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There was an idea in his mind, as well as in Howard's, which he intended to carry out, and half an hour after Howard started for church, he, too, left the house and walked slowly through the park in the direction of Mrs. Biggs's. "I don't know as it is just the thing to call on Sunday," he thought, hesitating a little as he came in sight of the house, "but it seems an age since I saw her.
With reason assuring him that the gambler was merely making a grand-stand play for the benefit of the bar-room crowd wedging itself in Biggs's doorway, Lidgerwood's lips went dry, and he knew that the haunting terror was slipping its humiliating mask over his face. But before he could say or do any fear-prompted thing a diversion came.
Biggs's apron, lying in a chair, and smoothed her hair, and took one of her clenched hands in his, and held it while the three tried to remove the boot. "'Tain't no use, it's got to be cut off, mine did. Tim, bring me the butcher knife, the sharpest one," Mrs. Biggs said. Eloise shuddered, and thought of the only other pair of boots she had, her best ones, which were to have lasted a year.
She and a woman from York State," Peter replied, and the Colonel continued, "Well, I s'pose those things will have to go to the sale, if Mrs. Amy says so, but I won't have them mixed with the quill wheels and boot-jacks and Widow Biggs's foot-stove and brass kettle, and I won't have a pack of idiots looking them over and buying them and saying they belonged to the Cromptons.
Jack liked it, and Howard, too, began to like it, or said he should if the girl proved as good-looking by daylight as she had been in the night. Notwithstanding Mrs. Biggs's prediction that she would not sleep a wink, Eloise did sleep fairly well. She was young and tired. Her ankle did not pain her much when she kept it still, and after she fell asleep she did not waken till Mrs.
Hastily covering her foot with a fold of the wide gown, she clasped her hands tightly together, and leaning her head against the back of her chair, drew a long breath and waited. She heard the steps outside, and Mrs. Biggs's "Good-mornin'; glad to see you. She is expectin' you, or I am. Yes, her laig is pretty bad.
Biggs's warming-pan and foot-stove and brass kettle, and Granny Baker's quill wheel and Mrs. Allen's wedding bonnet. Who was going to buy such truck? "And Peter," he said, in a lower tone of voice, "what do you think? Ruby Ann actually asked for my trousers! Yes, my trousers!
He was very fastidious in his tastes, and Mrs. Biggs's parlor was a horror to him, with its black hair-cloth furniture, and especially the rocker in which Eloise sat, and out of which she seemed in danger of slipping every time she bent forward. He had thought of his uncle's sea chair on the occasion of his first call, and now he resolved to send it in Amy's name.
Thinking him an official, she seized his arm and said, "Oh, please, sir, tell me is there any one here from Mrs. Biggs's, or any way to get there?" Her question was inopportune, for at that moment the stranger's umbrella met a like fate with her own, and was turned inside out, while hers, loosened by the opening of her hand, went sailing off into the darkness and rain.
This might have wounded a more sensitive nature, but Biggs's boys are not, as a rule, touchy. He came to a dead stop, a yard from our step, and, leaning up against the railings, and selecting a straw to chew, fixed us with his eye. He evidently meant to see this thing out. In another moment, the grocer's boy passed on the opposite side of the street.
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