Family Pride

"It's mean in him to speak so hateful to her," he was thinking just as Wilford came in, appearing so very amiable and good-humored that the boy ventured to inquire for Mrs. Cameron. "She looked so pale and sick, the other day," he said, "almost as bad in fact as she did that night in the cars with Dr. Grant, just before she was so dangerously ill."

"What's that? What did you say?" Wilford asked quickly, and Tom, thinking he had not been understood, repeated his words, while in a voice which Tom scarcely knew, it was so low and husky, Wilford asked: "What night was Mrs. Cameron in the cars with Dr. Grant? When was it, and where?"

As suspicion is an intense magnifier, so the absence of it will blind one completely, and Tom was thus blindfolded as he stated in detail how two months or more ago, while Mr. Cameron was absent, he had been sent by Mr. Ray to Hartford, returning in the early train, that just before him, in the car, a gentleman sat with a lady who seemed to be sick, at all events her head lay on his shoulder and he occasionally bent over her to see if she wanted anything.

"I did not mind much about them," Tom said, "till it got to broad daylight, when I saw the man was Dr. Grant, and when we reached New York the lady threw back her veil and I saw it was Mrs. Cameron."

"Are you sure?" and Wilford grasped Tom's arm with an energy which made the boy wince, while there came over him a suspicion that he had talked too much.

But it could not now be helped, and to Wilford's question he answered: "Yes, for she bowed to me and smiled."

"Where did they go?" was the next question, put in thunder tones, for Wilford was remembering things Katy said in her delirium, and which were now explained, if Tom's statement was true.

"They went off in a carriage toward your house, and that night I heard she was sick," Tom said, going back to his book, while Wilford seized his hat and started up Broadway. It was not his intention when he left the office to question the servants with regard to his wife, for every feeling and principle of his nature shrank from such an act, but by the time his home could be reached it could scarcely be said that he was in his right mind, and meeting Phillips in the hall, he demanded of her "if she remembered the day when Mrs. Cameron was first taken ill."