“It’s all right, honey,” he whispered. “I told him point-blank if he sent you back to the Home I’d leave, too. And that will hold him, because he can’t do without me at this busy season. He couldn’t get another hand right now for love or money, and he knows it. Go to sleep now, and don’t worry.”
The next morning at breakfast it was plainly evident that David had said one or two other things to Clem Carson, and that he in turn had passed them on to Pearl. For Pearl’s eyes bore traces of tears shed during the night, and the high color of anger burned in her plump cheeks. Carson’s anger and chagrin at losing all his hopes of David as a son-in-law and of acquiring, through his marriage to Pearl, the neighboring farm for his daughter, expressed itself in heavy “joshing,” each word tipped with venom:
“Well, well, how’s our Sally this morning? What do you know about this, Ma?—our little ‘Orphunt Annie’ is stepping out! Yes, sir, she ain’t letting no grass grow under her feet! Caught herself a feller, she has!”
“Eat your breakfast, Clem, and let Sally alone,” Mrs. Carson commanded impatiently. “She’s old enough to have a feller if she wants one.”
Tears of gratitude to the woman she had thought so stern gushed into Sally’s eyes, so that she could not see to butter the hot biscuit she held in her shaking hands.
“She’s cut you out, Pearl, beat your time all hollow! And looking as meek and mild as a Jersey heifer all the time! I tell you, Ma, it takes these buttery-mouthed little angels to put over the high-jinks!”
“I’m sure I wouldn’t have looked at a hired man,” Pearl cried angrily, tossing her head. “Sally’s welcome to him. But I can’t say I admire his taste.”
Sally’s eyes, drowned in tears, fluttered toward David.
“Don’t you think you’re going pretty far, Mr. Carson?” David asked abruptly.
“No offense, no offense,” Carson protested hastily, with a chuckle that he meant to sound conciliatory. “I’m a man that likes his joke, and it does strike me as funny that a fine, upstanding college man like you, due to come into property some day, should cotton to a scared little rabbit of an orphan like Sally here—”