“You want me to show you the horses, I suppose,” she said as the two set off side by side.
“No; any of the negroes could do that. I want you to render me a more skilled service.”
“What is it?”
“I want you, please, to pick out a horse for me to ride while I stay at Wyanoke.”
“While you stay at Wyanoke!” echoed the girl. “Why, that will be for all the time, of course.”
“I hardly think so,” answered the young man, with a touch of not altogether pleased uncertainty in his tone. “You see I have important work to do, which I cannot do anywhere but in a great city—or at any rate,”—as the glamour of the easy, polished and altogether delightful contentment of Virginia life came over him anew, and its attractiveness sang like a siren in his ears,—“at any rate it cannot be so well done anywhere else as in a large city. I have come down here to Virginia only to see what duties I have to do here. If I find I can finish them in a few months or a year, I shall go back to my more important work.”
The girl was silent for a time, as if pondering his words. Finally she said:
“Is there anything more important than to look after your estate? You see I don’t understand things very well.”
“Perhaps it is best that you never shall,” he answered. “And to most men the task of looking after an ancestral estate, and managing a plantation with more than a hundred negroes—”
“There are a hundred and eighty seven in all, if you count big and little, old and young together,” broke in the girl.