I sat where I was on the floor and stared into the fire.  Don’t tell me the way of the wicked is hard; the wicked get all the fun there is out of life, and as far as I can see, it’s the respectable “in at ten o’clock and up at seven” part of the wicked’s family that has all the trouble and does the worrying.

“If we could only keep it hidden for a few days!” I said.  “But, of course, the papers will get it, and just now, with columns every day about Miss Patty’s clothes—­”

“Her what?”

“And all the princes of the blood sending presents, and the king not favoring it very much—­”

“What are you talking about?”

“About Miss Jennings’ wedding.  Don’t you read the newspaper?”

He hadn’t really known who she was up to that minute.  He put down the tray and got up.

“I—­I hadn’t connected her with the—­the newspaper Miss Jennings,” he said, and lighted a cigarette over the lamp.  Something in his face startled me, I must say.

“You’re not going to give up now?” I asked.  I got up and put my hand on his arm, and I think he was shaking.  “If you do, I’ll—­I’ll go out and drown myself, head down, in the spring.”

He had been going to run away—­I saw it then—­but he put a hand over mine.  Then he looked at the door where Miss Patty had gone out and gave himself a shake.

“I’ll stay,” he said.  “We’ll fight it out on this line if it takes all summer, Minnie.”  He stood looking into the fire, and although I’m not fond of men, knowing, as I have explained, a great deal about their stomachs and livers and very little about their hearts, there was something about Mr. Pierce that made me want to go up and pat him on the head like a little boy.  “After all,” he said, “what’s blue blood to good red blood?”

Which was almost what the bishop had said!

CHAPTER VIII

AND MR. MOODY INDIGESTION

Mr. Moody took indigestion that night—­not but that he always had it, but this was worse—­and Mrs. Moody came to my room about two o’clock and knocked at the door.

“You’d better come,” she said.  “There’s no doctor, and he’s awful bad.  Blames you, too; he says you made him take a salt rub.”

“My land,” I snapped, trying to find my bedroom slippers, “I didn’t make him take clam chowder for supper, and that’s what’s the matter with him.  He’s going on a strained rice diet, that’s what he’s going to do.  I’ve got to have my sleep.”

She was waiting in the hall in her kimono, and holding a candle.  Anybody could see she’d been crying.  As she often said to me, of course she was grateful that Mr. Moody didn’t drink—­no one knew his virtues better than she did.  But her sister married a man who went on a terrible bat twice a year, and all the rest of the time he was humble and affable trying to make up for it.  And sometimes she thought if Mr. Moody would only take a little whisky when he had these attacks—!  I’d rather be the wife of a cheerful drunkard any time than have to live with a cantankerous saint.  Miss Cobb and I had had many a fight over it, but at that time there wasn’t much likelihood of either of us being called on to choose.