She shook her head. "It's the cheapest of the virtues."
"Not your kind, my dear child—it's the rarest and the costliest of achievements."
"Oh, I don't know how serious you are," she answered lightly, "but it's a little like putting a man on a desert island and saying, 'make your bed or lie on the rocks.' He's pretty apt to make his bed, isn't he?"
"Not in the least. He usually puts up a flag of distress and then sits down in the sand and looks out for a ship."
Her voice lost its merriment. "When my ship shows on the horizon, it will be time enough to hoist my flag."
A reply was on his lips, but before he could utter it, she had turned away and was moving rapidly across the lawn to the house.
The next morning Ordway went into Tappahannock, not so much on account of the little business he found awaiting him at the warehouse, as urged by the necessity of supplying Beverly with cigars. To furnish Beverly three times a day with the kind of cigar he considered it "worth while for a gentleman to smoke"—even though his choice fell, in Ordway's opinion, upon a quite inferior brand—had become in the end a courtesy too extravagant for him to contemplate with serenity. Yet he knew that almost in spite of himself this tribute to Beverly was now an established fact, and that as long as he remained at Cedar Hill he would continue to supply with eagerness the smoke which Beverly would accept with affability.
The town was dull enough at mid August, he remembered from the blighting experience of last summer; and now, after a fierce drought which had swept the country, he saw the big, fan-shaped leaves on Mrs. Twine's evening glory hanging like dusty rags along the tin roof of the porch. Banks was away, Baxter was away, and the only acquaintance he greeted was Bill Twine, sitting half drunk, in his shirt sleeves and collarless, on the front steps. There was positive relief when, at the end of an hour, he retraced his steps, with Beverly's cigars under his right arm.
After this the summer declined slowly into autumn, and Ordway began to count the long golden afternoons as they dropped one by one into his memory of Cedar Hill. An appeal to Mrs. Brooke, whom he had quite won over by his attentions to Beverly and the children, delayed his moving back into Tappahannock until the beginning of November, and he told himself with satisfaction that it would be possible to awake on frosty October mornings and look out upon the red and gold of the landscape.
Late in September Banks returned from his vacation, and during his first visit to Cedar Hill, he showed himself painfully nervous and ill at ease. But coming out for a walk with Ordway one afternoon, he suggested at the end of their first mile that they should sit down and have a smoke beneath a young cherry tree upon the roadside. As he lit his pipe he held the match in his hand until it burned his fingers; then throwing it into the grass, he turned upon his companion as eloquently despairing a look as it is in the power of a set of naturally cheerful features to assume.