Page:The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman.djvu/34

 “Dear Arthur,” I said, “I am not doing this for my amusement.”

“Oh, of course not!,” he answered. “All the same, I wish it could be avoided. And, if it can’t be avoided, I wish you’d kept more quiet about it. I don’t know what you said to Spenworth and Brackenbury, but they’re making the deuce’s own tale of it.” I begged him to enlighten me.

“Well,” said Arthur, “Spenworth says that you pretended to be at death’s door in order to force him to make a settlement on Will and that he might have consented if he hadn’t happened to know that you’d said the same thing to Brackenbury five minutes before. About being the head of the family and all that sort of thing. You know, Ann, it does make us look just a little bit ridiculous.”

You assure me you have seen neither Brackenbury nor Ruth? I just wondered who was privileged to hear this “deuce’s own tale”. . . I can hardly ask you to believe it; but I do assure you that this is the solemn truth; those two men were seeking to convince themselves that I was pretending to be ill in order to work on their susceptible emotions! They seem to have had the good taste to keep their little joke for home consumption, but you may be sure they made merry with Ruth and