But McKnight had not gone, after all. I heard
him coming back, his voice preceding him, and I groaned
with irritation.
“Wake up!” he called. “Somebody’s
sent you a lot of flowers. Please hold the box,
Mrs. Klopton; I’m going out to be run down by
an automobile.”
I roused to feeble interest. My brother’s
wife is punctilious about such things; all the new
babies in the family have silver rattles, and all
the sick people flowers.
McKnight pulled up an armful of roses, and held them
out to me.
“Wonder who they’re from?” he said,
fumbling in the box for a card. “There’s
no name—yes, here’s one.”
He held it up and read it with exasperating slowness.
“’Best wishes for an
early recovery.
A companion in misfortune.’
“Well, what do you know about that!” he
exclaimed. “That’s something you
didn’t tell me, Lollie.”
“It was hardly worth mentioning,” I said
mendaciously, with my heart beating until I could
hear it. She had not forgotten, after all.
McKnight took a bud and fastened it in his button-hole.
I’m afraid I was not especially pleasant about
it. They were her roses, and anyhow, they were
meant for me. Richey left very soon, with an
irritating final grin at the box.
“Good-by, sir woman-hater,” he jeered
at me from the door.
So he wore one of the roses she had sent me, to luncheon
with her, and I lay back among my pillows and tried
to remember that it was his game, anyhow, and that
I wasn’t even drawing cards. To remember
that, and to forget the broken necklace under my head!
FADED ROSES
I was in the house for a week. Much of that
time I spent in composing and destroying letters of
thanks to Miss West, and in growling at the doctor.
McKnight dropped in daily, but he was less cheerful
than usual. Now and then I caught him eying me
as if he had something to say, but whatever it was
he kept it to himself. Once during the week he
went to Baltimore and saw the woman in the hospital
there. From the description I had little difficulty
in recognizing the young woman who had been with the
murdered man in Pittsburg. But she was still
unconscious. An elderly aunt had appeared, a
gaunt person in black, who sat around like a buzzard
on a fence, according to McKnight, and wept, in a mixed
figure, into a damp handkerchief.
On the last day of my imprisonment he stopped in to
thrash out a case that was coming up in court the
next day, and to play a game of double solitaire with
me.
“Who won the ball game?” I asked.
“We were licked. Ask me something pleasant.
Oh, by the way, Bronson’s out to-day.”
“I’m glad I’m not on his bond,”
I said pessimistically. “He’ll clear
out.”
“Not he.” McKnight pounced on my
ace. “He’s no fool. Don’t
you suppose he knows you took those notes to Pittsburg?
The papers were full of it. And he knows you
escaped with your life and a broken arm from the wreck.
What do we do next? The Commonwealth continues
the case. A deaf man on a dark night would know
those notes are missing.”
