I suggested that we were staying for a few days at the Centropolis; and Alice added that we should be glad to see himself and Mrs. Trescott there at any time during our stay. Elkins promised that we should all drive out again.
“Wal, now, you must,” said Mr. Trescott. “We must talk over ol’ times and—”
“Fight over old battles,” replied Jim. “All the battles were yours, though, eh, Bill?”
“Huh, huh!” chuckled Bill; “fightin’s no credit to any man; but I ’spose I fit my sheer when I was a boy—when I was a boy, y’ know, Mrs. Barslow, and had more sand than sense. Here, Josie, here’s Mr. Elkins and some old friends of mine. Mr. and Mrs. Barslow, my daughter.”
She was a little slim slip of a thing, in white, and emerged from the shrubbery at Mr. Trescott’s call. She bowed to us, and said she was sorry that we could not stop. Her voice was sweet, and there was something unexpectedly cool and self-possessed in her intonation. It was not in the least the speech of the ordinary neat-handed Phyllis or Neæra; nor was her attitude at all countrified as she stood with her hand on her father’s arm. The increasing darkness kept us from seeing her features.
“Josie’s my right-hand man,” said her father. “Half the business of the farm stops when Josie goes away.”
My wife expressed her admiration for Lattimore and its environs, and especially for so much of the Trescott farm as could be seen in the deepening gloaming. The flowers, she said, took her back to her childhood’s home.
“Let me give you these,” said the girl, handing Alice a great bunch of blossoms which she had been cutting when her father called, and had held in her hands as we talked. My wife thanked her, and buried her face in them, as we bade the Trescotts good-night and drove home.
“That girl,” said Jim, as we spun along the road in the light of the rising moon, “is a crackerjack. Bill thinks the world of her, and she certainly gives him a mother’s care!”
“She seems nice,” said Alice, “and so refined, apparently.”