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Waugh! 'Why, that is Gunpowder tea, Lois, said Aunt Joan with grim sarcasm. 'Beautiful, isn't it? 'There is some awful mistake about this, said grandmother. 'I'll see that drunken Pete about it. Pete was called in. Grandmother brought the box of tea out before him and said: 'Pete, what is the matter with this tea? It has nearly poisoned us all to death.
"Betty and you and Lois are not the only Seniors at this school, though you do act most mighty like you thought you were. I got my permission from the two Dorothys," she finished with a triumphant toss of her head. Polly and Lois looked at each other in amazement. Something had come over Fanny of late. They had noticed it, but other matters had made it seem unimportant.
Lois stood up shrinkingly as they approached, the door behind her opened, and she heard her mother's voice. "Good-afternoon," said Mrs. Field, with rigid ceremony, her mouth widened in a smile. "Good-afternoon, Esther," returned Mrs. Maxwell. "I've been to the funeral, an' I thought I'd jest run in a minute on my way home. I wanted to ask you an' your niece to come over an' take tea to-morrow.
She drew the packet from her bosom, unlaced the thong, unrolled the deer-hide covering. "Here is a roll of bark," she said. "This I have never had interpreted. Can you read it for me, Euan?" And there in the lantern light I read it, while she looked down over my shoulder. "Aesa-yat-yen-enghdon, Lois! "Jatthon-ten-yonk, Lois! For a long time I gazed at the writing in shocked silence.
That worthy merely shrugged his shoulders. "The Count has been assassinated we believe by a woman. The doctors will tell us by and by." Alban shuddered at the words and took another step toward the bed. He felt giddy and faint. The words he had just heard were ringing in his ears as a sound of rushing waters. "Has Lois done this thing?" incredible! And yet the man implied as much.
"There's Bob," Polly exclaimed, as they followed the porter through the gates. "I can see him; he's way at the end of that line of people, and Lois, look who's with him!" Lois looked. A tall, heavily set fellow, with a very broad pair of shoulders, was waving his hat. "Frank Preston! Why how do you suppose " But the rest of the sentence was cut short by the meeting. "Hello, Mother!"
Lois did not often walk out for the mere sake of walking, there was generally some household errand to be transacted when any of the women of the family went abroad; but once or twice she had caught glimpses of the dreary, dark wood, hemming in the cleared land on all sides, the great wood with its perpetual movement of branch and bough, and its solemn wail, that came into the very streets of Salem when certain winds blew, bearing the sound of the pine-trees clear upon the ears that had leisure to listen.
The banker had influence enough with the Russian authorities to release both Lois and her father. He must do so or accept the consequences of his obstinacy. All this and much more was in Alban's head while he tossed restlessly upon his strange bed and waited impatiently for the day. The oddest fancies came to him, the most fantastic ideas.
Meanwhile, somewhere in him there remained the ghost of his faith in Lois, the faintly flickering hope that some day they would come together again. It lay dormant in him, like an irreligious man's unacknowledged faith in God and a hereafter, but it, too, vanished when he read in a Seattle newspaper, already three months old, the announcement of his wife's divorce.
"Oh, you don't know her," Lois answered. "You don't know how frail she is. And then there's Mr. Denner! It is the responsibility of it that kills me, Giff! I cannot get away from it for one single minute." They had walked along the road where the accident had taken place, and Lois shivered as she saw the trampled grass, though it had been her wish that they should come this way.
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