was a clammy pause; Susan and Mrs. Macy clasped hands.
"What made you think I had one?" Jathrop asked, quite bewildered. "Who said I had one?"
Susan rose with dignity and coughed. Mrs. Macy rose, too, looking at Susan. Poor Mrs. Lathrop seemed fairly terror-stricken.
"I think I'll go now," said Susan. "I hope I needn't board her much longer, that's all. Even if she's only using the floor, it's a floor as has been sacred to my dead father up to now, and a dead father is not to be lightly took in vain by a heathen Chinee."
"But what does it all mean?" asked Jathrop, appearing genuinely bewildered. "I don't understand. What are you talking about?"
Susan moved toward the door; Mrs. Macy faltered. "Maybe it was all right in the Klondike," she began, trying to put a brace under the situation.
"Maybe what was all right in the Klondike?" asked Jathrop.
"To buy her with beads."
"To buy who with beads? Who's her?" Jathrop's voice was becoming exasperated.
"Hop Loo," said Susan, in a tone of piercing scorn, "the Chinese lady as you brought with you and gave me to board."
Jathrop looked at them all in amazement. "But Hop Loo's a boy – my boy," he said.
"Your boy!" said Susan.
"Yes, my boy."
Miss Clegg turned and gave him a long look fraught with disgust, pity, and hopeless resignation.
"Jathrop Lathrop," she said, "I did suppose you had some sense even in the view of all that's dead and gone, but I guess now I'll have to give up. I did have some respect for you while I thought she was maybe your wife, but if you've gone so clean crazy that you believe that that is your boy – well!"
Susan thereupon sailed out of Mrs. Lathrop's house with Mrs. Macy wobbling in her wake.
III
SUSAN CLEGG SOLVES THE MYSTERY
Susan Clegg and Mrs. Macy walked down to Mrs. Lathrop's gate, and out of her gate and to Miss Clegg's gate; the whole in a silence deadly and impressive. Mrs. Macy paused there.
"I don't believe I'll come in," she said doubtfully.
"I don't blame you," said Susan, "I wouldn't if it was me. Jathrop's boy, indeed! What kind of a man is it as'll have a Chinese family and go forcing them onto the true and long-tried friends of his one and only mother!"
"I can't see why he didn't leave the boy in the Klondike," said Mrs. Macy slowly and reflectively. "I thought men always left their Chinese families just where they found 'em. It's strange Jathrop brought him home with him."
"You see now what my dream meant," said Susan darkly, "a cat, indeed. It's small wonder I knew the cat was Jathrop Lathrop. Of all the mean, sly, creeping creatures that ever come up against the back of your legs sudden a cat is the worst. A snake is open and aboveboard beside a cat. You can see a snake. You don't see 'em often around here, thank heaven."
"Well, we haven't seen Jathrop often around here for a long time," said Mrs. Macy, whose mind was as given to easy logical deduction as many of her mental caliber, "and we do see a lot of cats – you know that, Susan."
"'How's Susan Clegg?'" quoted Susan in a tone of reflective wrath. "I don't know whether you know it or not, Mrs. Macy, but Jathrop asked after me in his letter to his mother, and him with a Chinese wife. 'How's Susan Clegg?' What did he write that for if he was married, I'd like to know."
"Maybe he wanted to know how you were," suggested Mrs. Macy.
The look she received in recognition of this offered explanation led to her immediately proposing to go on home. "You've got the Chinaman to look after, anyhow," she added.
"You'd better come in while I go up and look at him again," said Susan shortly. "It's a very strange sensation to be alone in your house with what you fully and freely take to your dead father's bed and board, supposing it's a wife, and then find out as it's her son instead. Come on in."
Mrs. Macy was easily persuaded, and they thereupon went up the walk. "I guess I'll go see if he's still asleep," Susan said when they reached the piazza, and Mrs. Macy forthwith sat down to await what might come of it.
Susan was absent but a few minutes; she returned with a fresh layer of disapproval upon her face.
"Is he still sleeping?" Mrs. Macy asked.
"Yes, he's still sleeping," Miss Clegg replied, jerking a chair forward for herself. "You'd know he was Jathrop Lathrop's child just by the way he sleeps. You remember what a one Jathrop always was for sleeping. I don't know as I remember Jathrop's ever being awake till he was fairly grown. Whatever you set him at always just made him more sleepy. You know yourself, Mrs. Macy, as he wouldn't be no grasshopper with Mrs. Lathrop for his mother, but a cocoon is a comet beside what Jathrop Lathrop always was. I don't know whether he's rich or not, but I do know that heathen Chinee is his son, and I know it just by the way he sleeps."
"And so Jathrop's rich," said Mrs. Macy, rocking agreeably to and fro, and evidently striving toward more pleasant conversation.
"Yes," said Susan darkly, "rich and with a Chinese wife somewhere. Just as often as I think of Jathrop Lathrop writing, 'How's Susan Clegg,' with a Chinese wife I feel more and more tempered, and I can't conceal my feelings. I never was one to conceal anything; if I had a Chinese wife the whole world might know it."
Just here Gran'ma Mullins hove in sight, coming slowly and laboriously up the street.
"Why, there's Gran'ma Mullins!" Mrs. Macy exclaimed. "She's surely coming to see you, too."
Both ladies remained silent, watching the progress of Gran'ma Mullins.
Gran'ma Mullins arrived a good deal out of breath. Susan brought a chair out of the house for her.
"I come to – tell you," panted the new visitor as soon as she had attained unto the chair, "that Jathrop's – things is – coming."
"What things?" asked Susan.
"They all come on – the ten o'clock – from the junction; Hiram is helping unload."
"What's he brought?" Susan asked.
"Well, he's brought an automobile," said Gran'ma Mullins, "and a lot of other trunks and boxes."
"An automobile!" exclaimed Mrs. Macy, "well, he is rich then!"
"I wouldn't be too sure of that," said Susan, "some very poor folks is riding that way nowadays."
"And he brought three trunks and seventeen big wooden boxes," continued Gran'ma Mullins, "big boxes."
"Three trunks and sev-en-teen – Three trunks and sev-en – " Susan's voice faded into nothingness.
"Goodness knows what's in them," said Gran'ma Mullins. "Hiram was getting so hot unloading that I wanted him to stop and let me fan him, but he wouldn't hear to it. Hiram's so brave. If he said he'd unload something, he'd unload it if he dropped dead under it and was smashed to nothing."
There was a pause of unlimited bewilderment while Mrs. Macy and Susan raised Jathrop upon the pedestal
