“Have we not always paid you the interest promptly up to last fall?” she asked.
“Yes, that’s so.”
“And can’t you trust us to send it to you as fast as we can raise it?”
“Well, I reckon likely ye’d do it, but I’d a heap rather take it all with me. I don’t want to be hard on ye,” he repeated, “and I should hate to foreclose; but I do want the money mighty bad.”
Miriam’s cheek had grown very pale. “Oh, Mr. Himes,” she said, clasping her hands entreatingly, “you wouldn’t do that? You couldn’t have the heart to do it—to take all we have and turn us out of house and home?”
“I’d hate to do it, but every man must look to his own interests first and foremost.”
“Do you remember,” she said, low and huskily, “that it was to save the country my father borrowed this money and mortgaged his farm to you? and he gave his life to the cause; my brother gave his health and strength and the use of his arm; and what would your property be worth to-day if the country had gone to ruin?”
“Well, maybe not much,” he acknowledged after a moment’s cogitation, leaning forward with his eyes on the floor, his hat in his hands and his elbows on his knees, “and I shouldn’t like to distress ye. Give me the check for the hundred, and I’ll wait a spell for the rest. You’re a girl in a thousand, Miss Miriam, and I hope you’ll pull through all right yet.”
“Thank you,” she said, a little tremulously; “if I do not, it shall not be for lack of trying. Thank you for your forbearance, Mr. Himes. You shall have all I can possibly save this year, and if the crops are good, that will be all the interest and a large part of the principal. Indeed, if we recover the stolen notes I dare hope to pay off the whole this year.”
He went away with the comfortable feeling that he had shown himself a model of generous forbearance, and was deserving of any amount of good fortune in requital of it all.