"
These words gave her visitor an opening for which she had waited during
the last hour: "I'm glad my present was so opportune," said Miss Crofton
in her precise, old-fashioned way. "As we have mentioned money, I should
like to know, my dear, how you are situated? I was afraid from something
Cecil told me last time he and I met that you would be very poorly left."
She stopped speaking, and there followed a long pause. Enid Crofton was
instinctively glad that she was seated with her back to the window. She
was afraid lest her face should betray her surprise and discomfiture at
the question. And yet, what more natural than that her well-to-do,
kind-hearted sister-in-law should wish to know how she, Enid, was now
situated?
Cecil Crofton's widow was not what ordinary people would have called a
clever woman, but during the whole of her short life she had studied how
to please, cajole, and yes--deceive, the men and women about her.
Unfortunately for her, Alice Crofton was a type of woman with whom she
had never before been brought in contact; and something deep within her
told her that she had better stick as close to the truth as was
reasonably possible with this shrewd spinster who was, in some ways, so
disconcertingly like what Enid Crofton's late husband had been, in the
days when he had been a forlorn girl-widow's protecting friend and ardent
admirer.
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