Winton recovered the dainty note, folding it carefully and putting it in his pocket. The handwriting was the same as that of the telegram abstracted from Operator Carter's sending-book.
“I don't see anything to laugh at,” he objected.
“No? First the Rajah sends the sheriff's posse packing without striking a blow, and now he invites us to dinner.”
“You make me exceedingly tired at odd moments, Morty. Why can't you give Mr. Darrah the credit of being what he really is at bottom—a right-hearted Virginia gentleman of the old school?”
“You don't mean that you are going to accept!” said Adams, aghast.
“Certainly; and so are you.”
There was no more to be said, and Adams held his peace while Winton scribbled a line of acceptance on a leaf of his note-book and sent it across to the Rosemary by the hand of the water-boy.
Their reception at the steps of the Rosemary was a generous proof of the aptness of that aphorism which sums up the status post bellum in the terse phrase, “After war, peace.” Mr. Darrah met them; was evidently waiting for them.
“Come in, gentlemen; come in and be at home,”—this with a hand for each. “Virginia allowed you wouldn't faveh us, but I assured her she didn't rightly know men of the world: told her that a picayune business affair in which we are all acting as corporation proxies needn't spell out anything like a blood feud between gentlemen.”
For another man the informal table gathering might have been easily prohibitive of confidences a deux, even with a Virginia Carteret to help, but Winton was far above the trammelings of time and place. He had eyes and ears only for the sweet-faced, low-voiced young woman beside him, and some of his replies to the others were irrelevant enough to send a smile around the board.