“And pale, brown curls?” was the teasing Jimmie’s next query, to which Tom quickly responded:
“Curls, no. The hair was braided in wide plats and twisted around the head, falling low in the neck.”
“Not a very white neck, was it?” Jimmie continued, with imperturbable gravity.
“Indeed, it was,” Tom said, industriously scraping his thumb nail with his penknife. “White as snow, or looked so from the contrast with her dress. Who is she?”
“One question more,—had she big feet or little, slippers or boots?” and this time Jimmie’s voice betrayed him.
Tom knew he was being teased, and bursting into a laugh, he answered:
“I confess to having observed her closely, but not enough so to tell the size of her slipper. Come now, who is she? Some lady you spirited away from Secessiondom? Tell me,—you know you’ve nothing to fear from steady old Tom.”
For an instant the eyes of the two brothers met, with a curious expression in each. Both were conscious of something they were trying to conceal, while a feeling akin to a pang shot through Jimmie’s heart as he thought how much more worthy of Annie Graham’s respect was steady old Tom than a rollicking young scapegrace like himself.
“From your rather minute description I think you must have stumbled upon the Widow Graham,” he said. “Rose has taken her up, you know, and as a word of brotherly advice, let me say that if you wish to raise Rose to the seventh heaven you have only to praise her protégée. We, that is the widow and I, do not get on very well, for she is a staunch patriot, and until this morning I verily believe she looked on me as a kind of monster. She’s a perfect little Puritan, too, and if she stays here long, will make a straight-laced Methodist of Rose, under the garb of an Episcopalian, of course, as she is the strictest kind of a church woman.”
“I shall not esteem her less for that,” Tom said, and in rather a perturbed state of mind, as far as the Widow Graham was concerned, he went with Jimmie to the parlor, half hoping his brother had mischievously misled him, and that the stranger would prove after all to be some visitor from Boston.