"You won't look upon me as a sheriff, will you?" he added, as he mounted at the gate, to ride back to his hotel.
The girl shook her head, as he looked down at her quizzically.
"That was very stupid of me. My mind has been full of my trouble. I have dreamed about it, and hate the man who holds that mortgage.
"Please do not think of it any more. And when you come, sir, perhaps you can advise us what to do."
Ellesworth looked at her gravely. What would the following week, and the next, and the winter bring forth?
"Perhaps," he said in a whisper that might have come from the Delphian oracle; and then he cantered away.
For the first time since her father's death, Georgiella sang that afternoon as she walked about the garden teasing her plants to bloom.
It was Monday, the fifteenth of December. Mrs. McCorkle ushered Ellesworth upstairs into his own room in the cottage mortgaged in his own name. The sun poured into it like a living blessing. The rose-bush enveloped the windows, and when the sash was raised, delicate tendrils insinuated themselves within, as if, in Southern fashion, they would "shake howdy." The room was dainty and home-like. It flashed across Ellesworth as he sank into the cushioned rocking-chair with a long breath of content, that it might have been Georgiella's. It was in the dreamy part of the day. The sun was dipping under the high branches of the pines. Then the luxury of leaning out of the window in December! He could not help but think of it as his sun, and his garden and his trees. And now Georgiella came out, bareheaded, and swept the pine needles and leaves from the narrow box-bordered path, and snipped dead branches from the shrubs, and then before she went to feed the chickens she cast up at him a shy glance that made his heart leap within him. He did not leave his room until he was called to supper. His fancy was feverish, and kept picturing his mortgaged girl in a Boston drawing-room, thrilling all the people he knew with her beauty. He called it carmine beauty; but he was young and ardent.
He felt it when he first saw her, but that eventful afternoon he formulated it and repeated it over and over again until he became dizzy—"I love her! I love her!" And then visions of work and strength and success, and ambitions that had been stifled, began to spring within him like blades from watered bulbs. The electric shock had come. He knew it. He meant to spring to it like a man.