"I declare, Marse Jack," he went on, "dis sho'ly ain't you, is it? I declar to goodness if you ain't biggern yo' daddy wuz, and yo' gran'pa—the ole Jineral." He grew easily loquacious. "When I fust seed you a-comin' out dat cyar dore, I didn't know you, and yit I sed to myself, sholy I've seed dat face—hit 'pears mighty complicated to me somehow."
A smothered laugh from Eloise. "That is what I've been trying to say, Thomas, but couldn't, to save me, think of the right word. Thank you so much—'complicated,' Jack—that's too good!"
I showed plainly that I did not like this from Eloise. Ridicule we may bear, but not from our beloved. And I had loved Eloise always, but never so much as now. Then she suddenly broke into a smile, and said in her sweet sisterly way of old: "Forgive me, Jack—I haven't lost my old teasing way with you, have I?"
"I don't want you to," I said quietly.
"Well, what do you think of her?" broke in Aunt Lucretia.
"I can't tell you how beautiful I think she is, Aunt Lucretia," said I.
Eloise laughed, and looked dreamily up. How quickly her eyes had changed from daring to dreams. In her low, even laugh lay four years of fashionable Washington schooling. In the soft tones of her voice were a thousand music lessons. In the well-gowned girl before me was training, the spirit of gentlefolk, centuries of correct pedigrees. She had always been strong, and with a form as lithe as a young frost-pinched hickory. How she could ride a horse and handle a gun! Her hair had been yellowish and flossy, now it was like the distant flush of a red-top meadow, mower-ripe. I had left her an over-long school girl, thin and callow, daring, caring for nothing so much as running a risk of her neck and limbs in trees, and bare-back gallops on any half-broken colt on the farm. But now—
Aunt Lucretia, watching me, guessed.
"Oh, well, she'll pass, won't she?" she said rather braggartly for her, I thought. "You'll believe what I kept writing you now, eh? Though you never referred to it once, not once."
"Oh! Aunt Lucretia," began Eloise protestingly. Even her voice had changed. It was not the imperative, rollicking, colt-breaking voice of the school girl I had known four years ago. It was now like a fall of soft, freestone water over a moss-lined rock bed, purling into a deep pool below, sand-bordered and waveless.