eing-a wife and yet no
wife. In her desperate plight she besought her grandfather's clemency
and forgiveness but that rigid old covenanter had declared that even as
she had made her bed in willful disobedience to his command so she
should lie on it for all of him.
It was then that she had turned as a last resort to Ted Holiday though
always hoping against hope that she could keep the real truth of her
unhappy situation from him.
"It is a bad affair from beginning to end," wrote the doctor. "I'd like
to break every rotten bone in that scoundrel's body but he has taken
mighty good care to effect a complete disappearance. That kind is never
willing to foot the bills for their own villainy. I am telling you the
story in order to make it perfectly clear that you are to keep out of the
business from now on. You have burned your fingers quite enough as it is
I gather. Don't see the girl. Don't write her. Don't telephone her. Let
her alone absolutely. Mind, these aren't polite requests. They are
orders. And if you don't obey them I'll turn the whole thing over to your
uncle double quick and I don't think you want me to do that. Don't worry
about the girl. I'll look after her now and later when she is likely to
need me more. But you keep hands off. That is flat--the girl's wish as
well as my orders."
And this was what Ted Holiday had to carry about with him all that bleak
day and a half sleepless, uneasy night. And in the morning he was
summoned home to the House on the Hill. Granny was dying.
CHAPTER XXVIII
IN DARK PLACES
The House on the Hill was a strange place to Tony and Ted those November
days, stranger than to the others who had walked day by day with the
sense of the approaching shadow always with them. Death itself was an
awesome and unaccustomed thing to them. They did not see how the others
bore it so well, took it all so calmly. To make matters worse, Uncle Phil
who never failed any one was stricken down with a bad case of influenza
and was unable to leave his bed. This of course made Margery also
practically _hors de combat_. The little folks spent most of their time
across the street in motherly Mrs. Lambert's care. Upon Ned Holiday's
children rested the chief burden of the hour.
Granny was rarely conscious and all three of her grandchildren coveted
the sad privilege of being near her when these brief moments of lucidity
came though Tony and Ted could not stand long periods of watching beside
|