“And YO' don't?” continued Miss Sally.
“No. Why should I?” She noticed, however, that he had slightly drawn himself up a little more erect, and she smiled as he continued, “I dare say I should feel as he does if I were in his place.”
“But YO' wouldn't do anything underhanded,” she said quietly. As he glanced at her quickly she added dryly: “Don't trust too much to people always acting in yo' fashion, co'nnle. And don't think too much nor too little of what yo' hear here. Yo' 're just the kind of man to make a good many silly enemies, and as many foolish friends. And I don't know which will give yo' the most trouble. Only don't yo' underrate EITHER, or hold yo' head so high, yo' don't see what's crawlin' around yo'. That's why, in a copperhead swamp, a horse is bitten oftener than a hog.”
She smiled, yet with knitted brows and such a pretty affectation of concern for her companion that he suddenly took heart.
“I wish I had ONE friend I could call my own,” he said boldly, looking straight into her eyes. “I'd care little for other friends, and fear no enemies.”
“Yo' 're right, co'nnle,” she said, ostentatiously slanting her parasol in a marvelous simulation of hiding a purely imaginative blush on a cheek that was perfectly infantine in its unchanged pink; “company talk is much pootier than what we've been saying. And—meaning me—for I reckon yo' wouldn't say that of any other girl but the one yo' 're walking with—what's the matter with me?”
He could not help smiling, though he hesitated. “Nothing! but others have been disappointed.”
“And that bothers YO'?”
“I mean I have as yet had no right to put your feelings to any test, while”—
“Poor Chet had, yo' were going to say! Well, here we are at the cemetery! I reckoned yo' were bound to get back to the dead again before we'd gone far, and that's why I thought we might take the cemetery on our way. It may put me in a more proper frame of mind to please yo'.”