A Tangled Web by L. M. Montgomery Page A

looked at him—at his smooth, shining bald head, his sunken blue eyes, his toothless mouth. Old Crosby would never have false teeth. Yet in spite of the bald head and faded eyes and shrunken mouth, Crosby Dark was not an ill-looking old man—quite the reverse.
    â€œI have a mind to tell you something, Crosby,” said Aunt Becky. “You never knew it—nobody ever knew it—but you were the only man I ever loved.”
    The announcement made a sensation. Everybody—so ridiculous is outworn passion—wanted to laugh but dared not. Crosby blushed painfully all over his wrinkled face. Hang it all, was old Becky making fun of him? And whether or no, how dared she make a show of him like this before everybody?
    â€œI was quite mad about you,” said Aunt Becky musingly. “Why? I don’t know. You were handsomer sixty years ago than any man has a right to be, but you had no brains. Yet you were the man for me. And you never looked at me. You married Annette Dark—and I married Theodore. Nobody knows how much I hated him when I married him. But I got quite fond of him after a while. That’s life, you know—though those three romantic young geese there, Gay and Donna and Virginia, think I’m talking rank heresy. I got over caring for you in time, even though for years after I did, my heart used to beat like mad every time I saw you walk up the church aisle with your meek little Annette trotting behind you. I got a lot of thrills out of loving you, Crosby—many more I don’t doubt than if I’d married you. And Theodore was really a much better husband for me than you’d have been—he had a sense of humor. And it doesn’t matter now whether he was or wasn’t. I don’t even wish now that you had loved me, though I wished it for so many years. Lord, the nights I couldn’t sleep for thinking of you—and Theodore snoring beside me. But there it is. Somehow, I’ve always wanted you to know it and at last I’ve had the courage to tell you.”
    Old Crosby wiped his brow with his handkerchief. Erasmus would never let him hear the last of this—never. And suppose it got into the papers! If he had dreamed anything like this was going to happen, he would never have come to the levee. He glowered at the jug. It was to blame, durn it.
    â€œI wonder how many of us will get out of this alive,” whispered Stanton Grundy to Uncle Pippin.
    But Aunt Becky had switched over to Penny Dark and was giving him her bottle of Jordan water.
    â€œWhat the deuce do I care for Jordan water,” thought Penny. Perhaps his face was too expressive, for Aunt Becky suddenly grinned dangerously.
    â€œMind the time, Penny, you moved a vote of thanks to Rob Dufferin on the death of his wife?”
    There was a chorus of laughs of varying timbre, among which Drowned John’s boomed like an earthquake. Penny’s thoughts were as profane as the others’ had been. That a little mistake between thanks and condolence, made in the nervousness of public speaking, should be everlastingly coming up against a man like this. From old Aunt Becky, too, who had just confessed that most of her life she had loved a man who wasn’t her husband, the scandalous old body.
    Mercy Penhallow sighed. She would have liked the Jordan water. Rachel Penhallow had one and Mercy had always envied her for it. There must be a blessing in any household that had a bottle of Jordan water. Aunt Becky heard the sigh and looked at Mercy.
    â€œMercy,” she said apropos of nothing, “do you remember that forgotten pie you brought out after everybody had finished eating at the Stanley Penhallow’s silver-wedding dinner?”
    But Mercy was not afraid of Aunt Becky. She had a spirit of her own.
    â€œYes, I do. And do you remember, Aunt Becky, that the first time you killed and roasted a chicken after you were married, you brought it to the table with the insides