The pair sighed in concert and shook their gray heads. Of the real significance of the romance which lay so near them they were almost as completely ignorant as was the great yellow cat, who opened his eyes leisurely as Hannah let fall her ball of yarn, and then, considering that upon the whole the temptation to chase it was not worth yielding to, closed the lids over the topaz globes again with luxurious slowness. Themselves part of the battle between the old order and the new, the good creatures were hardly aware that such a struggle was being waged.
“She said,” Sarah murmured, bringing forward another scrap of the story, “that she never ’d marry him ’s long ’s her father objected, and if I don’t know that when once Leonard Grayman ’s sot his mind on a thing to that thing he ’ll stick till the crack o’ doom, then I don’t know nothin’ about him; that’s all. She won’t go back on her word, and he won’t let her off, and that’s just the whole of it.”
“No,” Hannah agreed, sniffing sympathetically, “they won’t neither of ’em change their minds; that you may depend upon.”
“He’d object if he was in his coffin, I do believe,” Sarah continued, with a curious mixture of pride in the family and of personal resentment. “The Graymans are always awful set.”
“George must be considerable rich,” Hannah observed, in a tone not without a note of reverence; “he’s sent you a power o’ money, first and last, ain’t he?”
“Considerable,” the other replied, with conscious elation. “I never used none of it. He kept sendin’ till I told him it wa’n’t no manner o’ mortal use; the family would n’t let me use it for them, and I had more ’n I knew what to do with anyway. I’ve got more ’n ’nough to bury me decenter ’n most folks.”
“Yes, I s’pose y’ have,” Hannah assented.
The knitters sat silent a little time, perhaps reflecting upon the thoughts which the mention of the last rites for the dead called up in their minds. The shadows were growing longer very fast now, and already the afternoon had grown cooler.
Suddenly a step sounded on the graveled walk, and a firmly built, handsome man of thirty-two or three came around the house and neared the porch where the old women sat.
“George!” cried old Sarah, so suddenly that the cat sprang up, startled from his dreams of ancestral mice. “Where on earth did you come from?”