"Mistress Jane," Brent sprang to his feet and bent double with an abandon that the Colonel's old bones would have resented, "will you adorn my buggy as far as the meetin'-house?"
"You overwhelm me," she murmured.
"And, will you tell us, O gracious bewitcher, how you knew what I was whistling for?"
"Help me up and I will," her hands went out to him. "When you whistled, Uncle Zack yelled: 'I'se fixin' 'em!'"
"I shall have that nigger shot," the Colonel cried in delight. "Suppose poor, dear Lizzie had been here!"
"What time shall we start?" she turned to Brent, seeing Zack on his way from the house, and somehow feeling that she could not stay just then. Her aversion for this was increasing. She did not know how firmly, how stubbornly, Brent had begun to shut down on his own indulgences.
"Any time you say," he agreeably answered. "Is it town?"
"No, the convent chapel."
"But—er—you'll forgive my wretched memory if I can't seem to recall when these things take up?"
"Five o'clock, over there," she smiled.