"Huh! you're just jealous because you weren't in the Uncle Izzy deal yourself," jeered Pythagoras. "You always think you're the only one that can do anything right."
"I wish you had been here, Polly," said Huldah, "I am sure you could have worked it through somehow."
"I wish I had stayed and put it across," he answered. "If you and the kids would only learn not to blab everything you know. It's the only way to work anything. Minute you tell a thing, it's all off."
There was still a great deal of development work to be put on Ptolemy's moral standard.
"You'll find, my lad," remonstrated Rob, "that honesty is the best policy."
"I'd have been perfectly honest about it," he defended. "I would have told him the truth, and how our parents had deserted us, and how mudder took us in when we were homeless and was bringing us up like her own because she hadn't got any, and how stepdaddy wanted to turn us out, and she wouldn't let him, and then he would have decided against stepdaddy and given mudder the money so she could keep us."
"Ptolemy," I said warningly, "there is a way of telling the truth, or rather of coloring white lies with enough truth to make them deceive, that is more dishonorable than an out and out lie."
"Tell me, Ptolemy," asked Silvia, "how did you know about that offer of five thousand dollars for each child?"
"I overheard it," he said guardedly; "but I can't remember where."
"It was when he first come here and he was making us so much trouble, and I told him it was too bad we had to have other folks' brats around when, if we only had our own, they'd be bringing in something."
The recital now broke up and Silvia sat down to write a long explanatory letter to Uncle Issachar. The next morning I procured her a check from the First National Bank and she filled it out.
"Oh!" she said with indrawn breath, when she had asked me how to write twenty-five thousand dollars, "I never expected to be able to sign my name to a check for such an amount."
"You never will again, I fear," was my sad prophecy.
"It must feel rich," said Beth, "just to have a large check pass through your fingers."
"Them Three" came the nearest to tears that they were able to do.
"I couldn't live a double life," declared Silvia.