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All you have to do is to write your name on the back and turn 'em into the bank." "Well, all I want to know is, what's it come to?" Lydia Vesey said. "Course it's just the same as money. I've had checks myself, days past. Once I done over Miss Tenny's black mohair an' sent it after her, an' she mailed me back a check, same day, I guess it was. How much's it come to, Marthy?"
The process of that investigation having disclosed evidences of rascality of which the rustling was but a minor feature, Stratton's desire to probe the mystery to the bottom seemed perfectly natural, and the need for secrecy was also accounted for. The only risk Buck ran was of Tenny's mentioning the matter to Hardenberg himself, and that seemed slight enough.
She could not, view it as keenly as she might, see that Jim Tenny's elopement had anything whatever to do with her three dollars per day. She, therefore, ate her supper. At first Andrew had looked warningly at Fanny when she began to discuss the subject before the dressmaker, but Fanny had replied, "Oh, land, Andrew, she knows all about it now. It's all over town."
Even when a great cheer went up from the crowd, and was echoed by another from the factory, with an accompaniment of waving bare, leather-stained arms and hands, that expression of desperate defiance instead of the joy of recovery did not leave her face, not until she saw Jim Tenny's face working with repressed emotion and met his eyes full of the memory of old comradeship.
"That's so," said the first man. "Yes, that is so," said the Swede, with a nod of his fair head. "And now to lose this young one that she set her life by," said the first girl, with an evident point of malice in her tone, and a covert look at the pretty girl at Jim Tenny's side. Jim Tenny paled under his grime; the hand which held the knife clinched.
As for the effect upon the girl of Julien Tenny's brilliant and unsettling personality, I could judge only as I saw them occasionally together, she lustrous and exotic as a budding orchid, he in the non-descript motley of his studio garb, serenely unconscious of any incongruity.
"That is so," said another man at Jim Tenny's right. "She is right to come out as she has done when she is so anxious for the child." This man was a fair-haired Swede, and he spoke English with a curious and careful precision, very different from the hurried, slurring intonations of the other men.
Jim Tenny's affection seemed to be waning, and Eva looked at herself in the glass even when bedecked with tawdry finery, and owned that she did not wonder. She strained up her hair into the latest perkiness of twist, and crimped it, and curled her feathers, and tied her ribbons not as much in hope as in a stern determination to do her part towards the furbishing of her faded star of attraction.
She had herself gone to Jim Tenny's house that evening, and called him to account, to learn that he had seriously taken her resolution not to marry at present to proceed from a fear that he would not provide properly for her, and that he had in this state of indignation been easily led by the sight of Aggie Bemis's pretty face in her front door, as he drove by, to stop.