"Why, my dear mother, those were your very words!"
"They were not! They were not my words! And yet, alas! how truly——" She turned and wept.
"O Lord! mother——"
"My son, you've broken the second commandment!"
"It was already broke! O for heaven's sake, mother, don't cave in in this hysterical way!"
The weeper whisked round with a face of wild beseeching. "O, my son, call me anything but that! Call me weak and credulous, too easily led and misled! Call me too poetical and confiding! I know I'm more lonely than I dare tell my own son! But I'm not—Oho! I'm not hysterical!" she sobbed.
So it continued for an hour. Then the lamp gave out and they went to bed.
The next morning John drove his mother to Suez for a visit of several days among her relatives, and rode on into Blackland to see if he could find "a girl" for Widewood. He spent three days and two nights at these tasks, stopping while in Blackland with—whom would you suppose? Proudfit, for all the world! He took an emphatic liking to the not too brainy colonel, and a new disrelish to his almost too sparkling wife.
As, at sunset of the third day, he again drew near Suez and checked his muddy horse's gallop at Swanee River Bridge, his heart leaped into his throat. He hurriedly raised his hat, but not to the transcendent beauties of the charming scene, unless these were Fannie Halliday and Barbara Garnet.