“For good?” she inquired.
“Yes, indeed, for good in every sense of the word, I do hope and believe. I will tell you all about it.”
Mrs. Pole jumped up and ran into her little bedroom adjoining the kitchen, and brought out a small, low-backed rocker, saying to her little lady:
“There! Sit ye down while you talk. You have often enough told me to ‘spare my back’ whenever I could lawfully do so. And now I tell you to spare your own.”
Palma laughed and dropped into her chair, and when Mrs. Pole had looked at her muffins and seen that they were doing well, and taken her own seat on a cane chair, Palma began:
“I will tell it to you as Cleve told it to me, for it is like a story, Poley. Here goes!
“Once upon a time there was an old man—a very rich old man—who lived in an old stone house at the foot of a mountain, called Wolfscliff, and the woods that clothed the side of the mountain were called Wolfswalk, because, when the land was surveyed and the first house was built there was neither sleep by night nor safety by day, for the wolves. They carried off hens and geese and sheep and calves, and—horror to relate!—even the little negro babies. This was how the place received its name. The wolves were worse than the Indians. They could neither be fought off nor bought off, but had gradually to die off, like the Indians.
“So the name came down the generations to the time of Jeremiah Cleve, the old man with whom my story commenced, and who lived in an old stone farmhouse in the woods at the foot of the mountain—a house many times larger than the log cabin of his first American ancestor.
“This Jeremiah had married an heiress in his own neighborhood, and so had doubled his fortune.
“They had three sons.