"I'll even go with you to Jeff-Jack and ask his advice—oh! Jane-Anne-Maria! now what's broke?"
"Only a mother's heart!" She looked up from her handkerchief. "Go seek his advice if you still covet it; I never trusted him; I only feared I might doubt him unjustly. But now I know his intelligence, no less than his integrity, is beneath the contempt of a Christian woman. I leave you to your books. My bed——"
"O mother, I wasn't reading! Come, stay; I'll be as entertaining as a circus."
"I can't; I'm all unstrung. Let me go while I can still drag——"
John rose. A horse's tread sounded. "Now, who can that be?"
He listened again, then rolled up his fists and growled between his teeth.
"Cawnsound that foo'—mother, go on up stairs, I'll tell him you've retired."
"I shall do nothing so dishonorable. Why should you bury me alive? Is it because one friend still comes with no scheme for the devastation of our sylvan home?"
Before John could reply sunshine lighted the inquirer's face and she stepped forward elastically to give her hand to Mr. Dinwiddie Pettigrew.
When he was gone, Daphne was still as bland as May, for a moment, and even John's gravity was of a pleasant sort. "Mother, you're just too sweet and modest to see what that man's up to. I'm not. I'd like to tell him to stay away from here. Why, mother, he's—he's courting!"