"That she do. Now, was you ever in love, Mr. William?"
"I have been thinking, Rhoda, that when you are a good scholar, and grandmother and you grow to like each other, as I believe you will, I might fall in love with you."
"Lord sakes! Me loved by a preacher? Couldn't I never stay home from the preachin'? But then, to hear your own ole man a-barkin' away at the other gals, I think it would be right good!"
The subject had now gone to that length that in a few days, to Grandmother Tilghman's slight indignation, Rhoda called the rector "William," and he answered her, "Dear Rhoda."
The triple widow, however, had one lane to her consideration, up which the artful Rhoda strayed as soon as she saw the gate ajar.
"Misc Tilghman," she said one day, "I been a-lookin' at you. I 'spect you was a real beauty. If you wasn't a little quar, nobody would see you was a ole woman now."
"I was a belle," spoke the blind old lady, emphatically. "General John Eager Howard said he would rather talk with me than hear an oration from Fisher Ames. Charles Carroll, of Carrollton, proposed to me when I was old enough to be your grandmother, and after Susan Decatur, the commodore's widow, had tried in vain to get an offer from him. Said I, 'Carroll, is this another Declaration of Independence? No,' said I, 'Carroll, I won't reduce the last signer, it may be, to obedience on a wife going blind. That would be worse slavery than George the Third's!' He said I was a Spartan widow."
"Every widow I ever see was a sparkin' widow," Rhoda naïvely concluded, at which Mrs. Tilghman had to join in the laughter, and there was no evil feeling.
Jack Wonnell now held the temporary post of cook and woodchopper at Teackle Hall, and Roxy saw him every day, sewed his tattered clothing up, put the germs of self-respect in him, and caused Vesta to say to her husband, as they were sitting in his storehouse parlor one afternoon, in the intermission of his chill and sweat:
"Such rapid changes have taken place here, Mr. Milburn, that they have disturbed my judgment, and now I hardly know whether my oldest prejudice is assured, as I see that white man the happy domestic servant of my pure slave girl. She seems to have no greater affection than pity and interest for him, while he is made more of a man by his undisguised devotion to her. No man could work better than he does now."