HAT was to be Margery's last evening at Fred's. Edith had kept her as long as she could, but the girl felt that her place was with Miss Letitia. Edith was desolate.
"I don't know what I am going to do without you," she said that night when we were all together in the library, with a wood fire, for light and coziness more than heat. Margery was sitting before the fire, and while the others talked she sat mostly silent, looking into the blaze.
The May night was cold and rainy, and Fred had been reading us a poem he had just finished, receiving with indifference my comment on it, and basking in Edith's rapture.
"Do you know yourself what it is about?" I inquired caustically.
"If it's about anything, it isn't poetry," he replied. "Poetry appeals to the ear: it is primarily sensuous. If it is more than that it ceases to be poetry and becomes verse."
Edith yawned.
"I'm afraid I'm getting old," she said, "I'm getting the nap habit after dinner. Fred, run up, will you, and see if Katie put blankets over the boys?"
Fred stuffed his poem in his pocket and went resignedly up-stairs. Edith yawned again, and prepared to retire to the den for forty winks.
"If Ellen decides to come down-stairs," she called back over her shoulder, "please come and wake me. She said she felt better and might come down."
At the door she turned, behind Margery's back, and made me a sweeping and comprehensive signal. She finished it off with a double wink, Edith having never been able to wink one eye alone, and crossing the hall, closed the door of the den with an obtrusive bang.
Margery and I were alone. The girl looked at me, smiled a little, and drew a long breath.
"It's queer about Edith," I said; "I never before knew her to get drowsy after dinner. If she were not beyond suspicion, I would think it a deep-laid scheme, and she and Fred sitting and holding hands in a corner somewhere."
"But why—a scheme?" She had folded her hands in her lap, and the eternal ring sparkled malignantly.
"They might think I wanted to talk to you," I suggested.
"To me?"
"To you— The fact is, I do."
Perhaps I was morbid about the ring: it seemed to me she lifted her hand and looked at it.
"It's drafty in here: don't you think so?" she asked suddenly, looking back of her. Probably she had not meant it, but I got up and closed the door into the hall. When I came back I took the chair next to her, and for a moment we said nothing. The log threw out tiny red devil sparks, and the clock chimed eight, very slowly.
"Harry Wardrop was here last night," I said, poking down the log with my heel.
"Here?"
"Yes. I suppose I was wrong, but I did not say you were here."
She turned and looked at me closely, out of the most beautiful eyes I ever saw.
"I'm not afraid to see him," she said proudly, "and he ought not to be afraid to see me."
"I want to tell you something before you see him. Last night, before he came, I thought that—well, that at least he knew something of—the things we want to know."
"Yes?"
"In justice to him, and because I want to fight fair, I tell you to-night that I don't believe he knows anything about your father's death, and that I believe he was robbed that night at Bellwood."
"What about the pearls he sold at Plattsburg?" she asked suddenly.
"I think when the proper time comes, he will tell about that too, Margery." I did not notice my use of her name until too late. If she heard, she failed to resent it. "After all, if you love him, hardly anything else matters, does it? How do we know but that he was in trouble, and that Aunt Jane herself gave them to him?"
She looked at me with a little perplexity.
"You plead his cause very well," she said. "Did he ask you to speak to me?"
"I won't run a race with a man who is lame," I said quietly. "Ethically, I ought to go away and leave you to your dreams, but I am not going to do it. If you love Wardrop as a woman ought to love the man she marries, then marry him and I hope you will be happy. If you don't—no, let me finish. I have made up my mind to clear him if I can: to bring him to you with a clear slate. Then, I know it is audacious, but I am going to come, too, and—I'm going to plead for myself then, unless you send me away."
She sat with her head bent, her color coming and going nervously. Now she looked up at me with what was the ghost of a smile.
"It sounds like a threat," she said in a low voice. "And you—I wonder if you always get what you want?"