"But, Rachel," protested Ruth, in laughing remonstrance, "he has one wife."
"Yes,'m. Pete Lawson ain't got no wife; but he ain't got but one arm, neither. Whicht one would you take, Miss Rufe?"
"Pete," declared Ruth. "He's a good boy, what there is of him."
"Well, I guess I better notify him to-night," sighed Rachel; but she held the love-letter on her knee and regretfully smoothed its crumpled edges.
Ruth pushed back her chair from the table and crossed the wide hall to the library.
It was a large room, with heavy wainscoting, above which simpered or frowned a long row of her ancestors.
She stepped before the one nearest her and looked at it long and earnestly. The face carried no memory with it, though it was her father. It was the portrait of a handsome man in uniform, in the full bloom of a dissipated youth. Her mother had seldom spoken of him, and when she did her eyes filled with tears.
A few feet farther away hung a portrait of her grandfather, brave in a high stock and ruffled shirt, the whole light of a bibulous past radiating from the crimson tip of his incriminating nose.
Next him hung Aunt Elizabeth, supercilious, arrogant, haughty. Ruth recalled a
tragic day of her past when she was sent to bed for climbing upon the piano and pasting a stamp on the red-painted lips.