"Well, 'twas all of Mrs. Somerton's doin', for she gave me a letter of introduction to Miss Mary Truett: the Lord reward her accordin' to her works, as the Apostle Paul said about Alexander the Coppersmith. I carried a lot of other letters, you'll remember, and every one to whom they were given was quite polite an' obligin'; but business is business, so as soon as the business was done, they were done with me. But Mary wasn't."
"She wasn't allowed to be," Mary whispered.
"I reckon that's so," Caleb admitted; "for somehow I kept wantin' to hear the sound of her voice just once more—just to see what there was about it that made it so different from other voices, so I kept makin' business excuses that I thought were pretty clever an' reasonable-like, an' she was always good-natured enough to take 'em as they were meant."
"What else could she do?" asked Mary, with an appealing look. "The rules against personal acquaintances dropping into the store to chat were quite strict, and applied to heads of departments as well as to other employees. Caleb's plausible manner deceived no one, but he was so odd, at first, and so entertaining, that every one in authority in the store quickly learned to like him, and were glad to see him come in. They would make excuses to saunter near us, and listen to the conversation, and whenever he went out, some of them remained to tease me. They saw through him before I did, and made so much of what they saw that, in the course of time, I had to work hard to rally myself whenever I saw Caleb approaching."
"She did it splendidly, too," said Caleb. "In a little while I got so that my eye could catch her the minute I found myself inside the store, no matter how many people were between us, yet I'm middlin' short, as you know, an' she isn't tall. She'd be talkin' business, as sober as a judge, with somebody, but by the time I got pretty nigh, her face would look like a lot o' Mrs. Somerton's pet flowers—red roses, an' white roses, an' a couple o' rich pansies between, an' around 'em all a great tangle o' gold thread to keep 'em from gettin' away."
"Caleb!" exclaimed Mary. "Your friends want only facts."
"I'm sure he's giving us nothing else," Grace said, looking admiringly at Mary, while Philip added:—
"He's doing it very nicely, too. Bravo, Caleb! Go on."
"Well, she was kind o' curious about the West, like a good many other New Yorkers who hadn't ever been away from home, and one day she asked me if there was any chance out here for a young man who was a civil engineer and landscape architect. She said so much about the young man's smartness an' willingness, an' pluck, an' good nature, that all of a sudden I found myself kind o' hatin' that young man, an' it didn't take me long to find out why, an' when I saw that the trouble was that I was downright jealous of him, I said to myself, 'Caleb, you're an old fool,' an' I put in some good hard prayin' right then an' there. Suddenly she explained that the young man was her brother, an'—well, I reckon there never was a prayer bitten off shorter an' quicker than that prayer was. She wished he could meet me, an' I said that any brother o' hers could command me at any time an' anywhere, so we fixed it that I should call at their house that very evenin'. Well, I liked his looks an' his p'ints in general, an' he asked no end o' the right kind o' questions, an' she helped him. I told 'em ev'rythin', good an' bad—specially the latter—malaria, scattered population, bad roads, poor farming, poor clothes, scarcity of ready cash, all the houses small an' shabby; for up to that time it seemed to me that everybody in New York lived in a palace an' wore Sunday clothes ev'ry day of the week; afterwards I went about with some city missionaries an' policemen, an' came to the conclusion that the poorest man in this town an' county is rich, compared with more than half of the people in New York. But that's gettin' over the fence an' into another field. Her brother was so interested that nothin' would do but that I should go back an' take supper with 'em next evenin' an' continue the talk. Well, 'Barkis was willin',' as a chap in one of your circulatin' library books said. Pity that library's burned; I'll put up half the expense of a new one, for if ever there was a means of grace—"
"It shall be replaced," said Philip, "but—one means of grace at a time. Do go back to the original story."