Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/497

Rh sation in order to enable Mr. Mangam to talk with us, I am sure I don't know what we could say. Mr. Mangam never talks, anyway."

"It ain't always the folks that talks that knows the most and is the best," said Mrs. Lynn. Then her face upon her daughter's turned malevolent, triumphant, and cruel. "I wa'n't goin' to tell you what I heard when I was in Mis' Ketchum's this afternoon," she said. "I thought at first I wouldn't, but now I'm goin' to."

"What do you mean, mother?" asked Sarah, in an angry voice; but she quailed.

"I thought at first I wouldn't," her mother continued, pitilessly, "but I see to-night how things are goin'."

"What do you mean by that, mother?"

"I see that you are fool enough to get to likin' a man that has got the gift of the gab, and that you think is good-lookin', and that wears clothes made in the city, better than a good honest feller that we have all known about ever since he was born, and that ain't got no outlandish blood in him, neither."

"Mother!"

"You needn't say mother that way. I ain't a fool, if I haven't been to school like some folks, and I see the way you two looked at each other to-night right before that poor man that has been comin' here steady and means honorable."

"Nobody asked or wanted him to come," said Sarah.

"Maybe you'll change your mind when you hear what I've got to tell you. And I'm goin' to tell you. Hyacinthus Ware has got a woman livin' over there in that house."

Sarah turned ghastly pale, but she spoke firmly. "You mean he is married?" she said.

"I dun'no' whether he is married or not, but there is a woman livin' there."

"I don't believe a word of it."

"It don't make no odds whether you believe it or not, she's there."

"I don't believe it."

"She's been seed."

"Who has seen her."

"Abby Jane Ketchum herself, when she went round to the back door day before yesterday afternoon to ask if Mr. Ware would buy some of her soap. You know she's sellin' soap to get a prize."

"Where was the woman?"

"She was sittin' on the back porch with Mr. Ware, and she up and run when she see Abby Jane, and Mr. Ware turned as white as a sheet, and he bought all the soap Abby Jane had left to git out of it, so she's got enough to get a sideboard for a prize. And Abby Jane she kept her eyes open and she see a blind close in the southwest chamber, and that's where the woman sleeps."

"What kind of a looking woman was she?" asked Sarah, in a strange voice.

"As handsome as a picture, Abby Jane said, and she had on an awful stylish dress. Now if you want to have men like that comin' here to see you, and want to make more of them than you do of a man that you know is all right and is good and honest, you can."

There was something about the girl's face, as she turned away without a word, that smote her mother's heart. "I felt as if I had to tell you, Sarah," she said, in a voice which was suddenly changed to pity and apology.

"You did perfectly right to tell me, mother," said Sarah. When at last she got in her little bedroom she scarcely knew her own face in the glass. Hyacinthus Ware had kissed that face the night before, and ever since the memory of it had seemed like a lamp in her heart. She had met him when she was coming home from the post-office after dark, and he had kissed her at the gate and told her he loved her, and she expected, of course, to marry him. Even now she could not bring herself to entirely doubt him. "Suppose there is a woman there," she said to herself, "what does it prove?" But she felt in her inmost heart that it did prove a good deal.

She remembered just how Hyacinthus looked when he spoke to her; there had been something almost childlike in his face. She could not believe, and yet in the face of all this evidence! If there was a woman living in the house with him, why had he kept it secret? Suddenly it occurred to her that she could go over in the garden and see for herself. It was a bright moonlight night and not yet late. If the woman was there, if she inhabited the southwest chamber, there might be some sign of her. Sarah placed her lamp on her bureau, gathered her skirts