Lizzie had suppressed her laughter till she was weak. "At you, Amos! Till my dying day, I'll never forget how you looked prancing round the room with that chair glued to your back!"
"Oh, Daddy! It must have been funny!" cried Lydia, beginning to giggle.
Amos looked uncertainly at his two women folk, and then his lips twisted and he laughed till the tears ran down his cheeks.
"Lydia! Lydia!" he cried, "don't try to be elegant with any more of your callers! It's too hard on your poor old father!"
"I won't," replied Lydia. "He likes the mahogany, anyway. But he'll never come again," she added, with sudden gloom. "Not that I care, stiff old Harvard thing," and she patted Adam and went soberly to bed.
But Professor Willis did come again. Not so frequently, of course, as to compromise his dignity. An instructor who called on freshman girls was always laughed at. But several times during the winter and spring he appeared at the cottage, and talked with Lydia earnestly and intellectually. Nor did he always confine his calls to the evening.
One Sunday afternoon in March Amos was in town with John Levine, who was on one of his hurried visits home, when Billy Norton came over to the cottage.
Lydia, who was poring over "The Ring and the Book," saw at once that something was wrong.
"What's worrying you, Billy?" she asked.
"Lydia," he said, dropping into Amos' chair and folding his big arms, "you know my tract of land—the one I was going to buy from an Indian? I paid young Lone Wolf a ten dollar option on it while I looked round to see how I could raise enough to pay him a fair price. He's only a kid of seventeen and stone blind from trachoma. Well, yesterday I found that Marshall had bought it in. Of course, I didn't really think Lone Wolf knew what an option was, but Marshall and the Indian Agent and Levine and all the rest knew what I was trying to do, so I thought they'd keep their hands off."