“Does he know about your affairs?”
She thought carefully. “Ye-es,” she admitted. “He knows; not that I ever told him much, but he always guessed, I reckon. I fibbed to him about everything,” she laughed at the remembrance, “but you can’t fool Mitchell Lear. Words aren’t anything to him; he just looks on quietly through your eyes and into the very privacy of your soul. Once I told him a long story about deciding to buy more orchard land—buy, you understand—and after I was quite done, he nodded his wise head and remarked, ‘I’m sorry you’ve made up your mind to sell!’ ‘But I said “buy,”’ said I. ‘I heard you,’ said he; ‘and I say that you are making a mistake to sell.’”
Mrs. Wells laughed quietly and contentedly at the remembrance. “And the funny part of it was,” she told Richard, “I had just sold all the orchard we possessed; and it was a mistake, too,” she added, “just as he knew it would be.... Oh, well! I mustn’t think of those things any more; they make me too unhappy.”
Mrs. Wells was sorry to see Richard go—there were many more things to show him, but he would have none of them. With a faintly troubled face she watched him stride down a path and disappear behind a grove of hollyhocks. But in a moment or two she had forgotten about him and was calling her blacks about her. The imperative duty of the hour was rose-bugs.
CHAPTER XX
SETH’S WHIP
Richard’s best singing of the “Hel-lo” call failed to bring a response from Jerry.
“Mrs.” George Alexander, who, as “Sukie,” presided over the kitchen, reckoned that Miss Geraldine had gone down to visit Mrs. Phœbe Norris. That’s what she “reckoned,” but she “’lowed” that Miss Geraldine might go even farther. One of the Wheelen boys was with her.
“When one o’ dem Wheelen boys comes ’long,” Sukie explained, “nobody c’d tell whar M’s Geraldine ’ud lan’ up. Ef she jes’ tuck it in her head to go plum down dat Lake to Hammonspo’t, plum down dat Lake she’d go! When M’s Geraldine gits in dem canoes she jes’ na’chully do’ know when to git outen ’em!”
Off on a canoe trip! That did not sound like bankruptcy; although it corresponded surprisingly to the mother’s free and easy Southern manner of handling high finance.
But perhaps Sukie’s “reckoning” was more nearly correct than her “’lowing.” He would investigate further at the Norris cottage.