"Oh, I shouldn't feel that way, if I were you," she qualified. "He seems very humble and penitent this morning, though he is still twinkly-eyed, and I couldn't make him talk much. He said we'd want to be having our breakfast, and——"
"We don't breakfast with him," was the crabbed rejoinder.
"Why, Donald!" she protested, in a laughing mockery of deprecatory concern. "I believe you are still angry. You really mustn't hold spite, that way. It isn't nice—or Bankhead-y."
He looked her fairly in the eyes. "Don't begin by throwing the old minister ancestor up at me, Lucetta. I can't help the grouch, and I don't know as I want to help it. Every time I think of you lying there under the big spruces, sick and discouraged, suffering for the commonest necessities and with no possible chance of getting them, I want to go out and swear like a pirate and murder somebody. Why doesn't he bring that auto, if he is going to?"
As if the impatient demand had evoked him, Grider appeared on the wharf and beckoned to them. Prime helped his companion up to the string-piece, and had only a scowl for their late host as Grider led the way to the street and a waiting auto. The barbarian stood aside while Prime was putting Lucetta into the car and clambering in after her. Then he took the seat beside the driver, and no word was said until the car was stopped before the entrance of an up-town hotel, where Grider got down to open the tonneau door for the pair on the rear seat.
"You'll want to have your first civilized breakfast by yourselves and I shan't butt in," he offered good-naturedly. "Later on, say about ten o'clock, I'll be glad to see you both in the ladies' parlor—if you can forgive me that far."
Prime made no reply, but after they were seated in the comfortable breakfast-room and were revelling in their surroundings and in the efficient service he broke out again.
"Grider still has his brass-bound nerve with him; to ask us to meet him! I'd see him in kingdom come first, if I wasn't spoiling to tell him a few things."
"Perhaps he wishes to try to explain," came from the less vindictive side of the table-for-two. "Think a moment, Cousin Donald: you two have been friends and college chums, and—and Mr. Grider has been brotherly good to you in times past, hasn't he? And I don't want you to quarrel with him."
"Why don't you?"