Two Flights Up by Mary Roberts Rinehart Read Free Book Online Page B

that it’s been found.”
    “It isn’t that.” She swallowed, as if to moisten her dry throat. “She’s taken one bond already, and you see—she needs it so dreadfully.”
    It was at that moment that he felt a cold chill travel slowly up his spine and settle in his brain. The part he himself had already played in the situation began to dawn on him. He had sold a stolen bond, one of the carefully listed missing securities of a looted bank! Sooner or later—
    He pulled himself together and smiled down at her gravely.
    “What’s your own idea?” he asked.
    “They have to go back to the bank, of course. Only, Mother’s got to be kept out of it. There must be some way.”
    “Of course there’s a way,” he told her.
    But he was not so sure of it. One of the bonds had already been sold. It might escape identification indefinitely; on the other hand, it might already have been recognized, his residence in the Bayne house noted, and a fatal connection established. In that case—
    “See here,” he said. “Suppose I take the suitcase down to my room overnight? Then in the morning I can see the bank people and arrange for everything to be done quietly.”
    “Without dragging Mother in?”
    “I’ve promised to keep her out, haven’t I?”
    She swayed a little as he helped her up. Still holding the candle, he lifted the suitcase; dust had penetrated the old floor boards and covered it, and he shook that off. Then he replaced the boards and took a last look around him.
    “Better go ahead,” he told her. “I’ll follow after you’re safely down.”
    But she stood still, looking up at him.
    “Why should you help us?” she said. “We are nothing to you.”
    “You are everything in the world to me,” he said quietly, and watched her down the stairs.

CHAPTER TEN
    M ARGARET COX WAS VERY happy. She had even gained in flesh; every now and then James, her husband, put a penny in the slot of some weighing machine and stood by, eying the result proudly.
    “A woman’s the better for a little meat on her bones,” he would tell her. “It shows somebody’s looking after her.”
    And she no longer clenched her left hand for fear somebody would see her scarred forefinger. “Open it out,” said lordly James. “It’s only lazy hands that people have a right to be ashamed of. Only—” and here his voice would soften—“only, I wish the blisters were on mine and not on yours, my girl.”
    He always called her his girl, and in his eyes Margaret really was a girl; he had never quite got over his astonishment at the depths of her ignorance in some matters.
    “Well, I’m darned,” he would say. “Didn’t they ever tell you anything at all?”
    “They” in his mind were Margaret’s family, and less immediately that terra incognita of aristocracy and repressions from which he had abducted her. “Certainly put one over on them,” was his manner of referring to that abduction.
    “There were a good many things we were taught not to discuss,” she would say, colouring faintly. “It wasn’t considered ladylike.”
    “Well, you can’t be a real honest-to-John woman and be their kind of a lady at the same time,” he would retort, and chuckle a bit.
    Undoubtedly he was a vulgar little man, but he was honest, good-humoured, and sturdily independent. “I stand on my own feet,” was one of his commonest expressions. Oddly enough, Margaret not only did not resent his vulgarity; she seemed indeed rather to like it. It was perhaps her idea of a gesture toward truth after a lifetime of polite evasions.
    And probably it was. James’s honesty was his outstanding quality; he had a tremendous pride in it.
    “You can tell them,” he had said during the strange days of their courtship, “that I’m no great shakes as to money or position, but you can tell ’em too for me that, by God, I’m honest. And that’s more than they can say.”
    Which was, by the way, the only reference he had ever made to Margaret