“Oh, Father!” said Edna, carelessly. “He’s just melodrama.... And we won’t tell Mother, and she’ll pretend not to know where we’ve gone. We can—”
“But I don’t like it!” he protested. “It’s a humiliating position for me.”
“It really isn’t, Mr. Stephens. We’re the humiliated, deceitful ones, and we don’t care. Do you know the country round here?”
“I was born a few miles down the river,” he answered, soberly. “In Brownsville Landing.”
Andrée came sauntering out of the house, and caught his words.
“I’d like to hear about you,” she said, but he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “That’s a mistake. What used to be me isn’t me now. It’s—well, it’s like these books—they start off when the fellow’s a baby, and they tell you all the things he thought and all the ways he grew and changed, until you can’t see him at all. I’m darned glad you never saw me or heard of me before, and you’ve got to see only what I am now.” He smiled ingenuously. “It’s not much,” he said, “but it’s what I’ve worked twenty-eight years on, anyway.”
“Come on; let’s start somewhere,” said Edna. “Or Mother’ll come out and have to not ‘countenance’ it. Let’s take a ‘ramble’; that’s what Father calls a walk.”
“It is a ‘ramble,’ too, with him,” said Andrée.
“Well,” said Stephens, “there’s a nice place up the road five or six miles—nursery for all kinds of evergreens, and a little hotel. If you think you can do it—? It’s a steep climb.”