“It’s about the only thing he ain’t never done,” the tried and true servant answered, her tone more gratingly penetrative than ever.

Aunt Mary eyed her sharply, not to say furiously.

“I wish you’d give a plain answer when I ask you a plain question, Lucinda,” she said coldly.  “If you’d ever got a breach-of-promise suit in the early mail you’d know how I feel.  Perhaps—­probably.”

“I ain’t a doubt but what he done it,” Lucinda screamed out; “an’ if I was her an’ he wouldn’t marry me after sayin’ he would I’d sue him for a hundred thousand, an’ think I let him off cheap then.”

Aunt Mary deigned to smile faintly over the subtlety of this speech; but the next minute she was frowning blacker than ever.

“A girl from Kalamazoo, too, just up in Chicago for a week—­just up in Chicago long enough to come down on me for fifteen thousand dollars.”

“Maybe she’ll take five thousand instead,” Lucinda remarked.

“Maybe!” ejaculated her mistress, in fine scorn.  “Maybe!  Well, if you don’t talk as if money was sweet peas an’ would dry up if it wasn’t picked!”

Lucinda screwed up her face.

Aunt Mary gave her one awful look.

“You get me some paper an’ my desk, Lucinda,” she said.  “I think it’s about time I was takin’ a hand in it myself.  I’ve been pretty patient, an’ I don’t see as it’s helped matters any.  Now I’m goin’ to write that boy a letter that’ll settle him an’ his cats, an’ his cooks, an’ his cabmen, an’ his Kalamazoo, just once for all.  I guess I can do what I set out to do.  Pretty generally—­most always.”

Lucinda brought the desk, and Aunt Mary frowned fearfully and began to write the letter.

It developed very strongly.  As her pen sized up the situation in black and white, the old lady seemed to realize the iniquities of the case more and more plainly; and as the letter grew her wrath grew also.  The whole came, in the end, to a threat—­made in good earnest—­to take a very serious step indeed if any more “foolishness” developed.

Aunt Mary prided herself on her granite-like will.  She had full faith in her ability to slay her nearest and dearest if it seemed right and best to do so.

She sealed her letter tight, stuck the stamp on square and hard, and bid Lucinda convey it to Joshua and tell him never to quit it until he saw it safe on to the evening train.

“She’s awful mad at him for sure, this time,” said Lucinda after she had delivered her message, and while Joshua was considering the front and back of the letter with a deliberateness born of long servitude.

“I sh’d think she would be,” he said.

As nearly all of Jack’s private difficulties were printed in every newspaper in America, Joshua naturally was on the inside of all their history.

“She scrinched up her face just awful over that letter,” Lucinda continued.  “I’m sure I wish he’d ‘a’ been by to ‘a’ taken warnin’.”