“No,” he said. “No; I’ll stick it out to the end.”
He would have been more concerned, and he would have been thoroughly angry, if he could have heard Agnes Caretall talk to Amos when he had left. She came in to retrieve her lost slipper; and she was fuming indignantly. Old Maria Hale, setting the table for breakfast as she always did, the last thing at night, overheard a word or two of their talk. She heard Agnes exclaim:
“I don’t see how you can be so calm, just because you elected him. But that doesn’t give him any right to think he can do a thing like that with me.”
And she heard Amos’s slow, even voice reply:
“No; it doesn’t give him any right.”
“I should think you could say something,” Agnes cried. “Your own daughter!”
Maria heard Amos say something about “fooling.” And Agnes retorted:
“It wasn’t fooling! It was—plain insulting!”
“Well, we can’t let him do that,” Amos agreed drawlingly. Then Maria departed to the kitchen and heard no more. She had paid no particular attention. The old darky lived in a world of her own. A quiet world. A world that was not far from coming to its end. She was very old.
After Agnes left him and went upstairs Amos sat for a long time, very still, before the fire. His eyes were weary, and his calm face was troubled.