“You see a gentleman and a Morris can’t visit in a gentleman’s house without money to spend, and ten dollars was a paltry sum any way, when you consider that it is my own, or will be when I come of age. I tell you what, Ken, Uncle Eph must shell out ten more at least and send me. There must be that much due me; if not, tell him to loan it and keep it back from my next allowance. I can skimp at home, but not here, where they look upon me as a sort of millionaire. I’m awful glad Tom did not go home with me as he proposed doing. When I’m of age I shall fix up the Morris Place and invite him there with some more bloods, and perhaps I’ll have some of Aunt Polly’s brood as servants, and, by George, why not have Aunt Polly, too, if she is alive? An old family servant like that, who has been a slave, would add éclat to my establishment; don’t you think so?

“I suppose Connie Elliott is with you now, as you wrote she was coming. Just for a minute, after I got your letter with uncle’s consent for me to come to Kentucky, I half wished I was going home to see her, but am glad I came here. Tom has a sister, eleven years old, pretty and shy, and will some day have quite a fortune from her father and her aunt, who lives in Louisville, and has no children of her own. Think of her sending fifty dollars to the Haynes family, to be spent as they like for Christmas presents. That’s the kind of an aunt to have when your pocket is empty, like mine. Give my regards to Connie and write me if she is pretty. Get ten dollars for me somehow.

“Yours,

“Hal.”

Several times during the reading of the letter the deacon had moved uneasily in his chair, crossing and recrossing his legs, and twice going to the door to spit. He did not like the tone of the letter. Neither did his wife. It was the Morris blood cropping out, and they had seen too much of that when Charles Morris lived across the way and tried to lord it over his neighbors. They remembered his fast horses and hounds and carousals, and remembered the white-faced girl who died when she heard of his dissipations when he was away from The 4 Corners. They remembered, too, that with all his faults, there was a smooth exterior and a pleasant way which took with people, and Harry had the same and had made them love him almost as their own. His father was a spendthrift, but had left enough to supply every reasonable want of his son when it was looked after as carefully as the deacon looked after it. Ten dollars had been thought ample for his spending money at Cedar Grove, and here he was asking for ten more.

“I s’pose we must get it somehow,” he said. “The Morrises were high steppers, and I dare say the Hayneses are the same, and Hal wants to keep up his end; but I don’t like the way he wrote, as if he was lookin’ down upon us because he is a Morris. Great Scott! his father was a villain, with all his polish and blood, and if he had lived he’d spent every cent he was wuth. The dog! I knew him!”

The deacon was a good deal excited, and in the letter which he sent to Harry next day, with ten dollars, he told him not to make a fool of himself because he was a Morris.

“The Morrises are well enough,” he wrote, “but, Lord Harry, that isn’t all. It needs something besides being a Morris to make a man.”

CHAPTER VII
GOOD-BYE

Kenneth said it to Connie with a swelling heart, just a week from the day when he first saw her at the station, in her blue cloak and hood. Mrs. Hart had stayed her allotted time, and had felt that each day she stayed grew longer and more tiresome. She had impressed upon Connie that, although the country might be nice in many respects, it was not a desirable place in which to stay, or to visit very often, and Connie was about equally divided between her love for the city and country. She had had a “jam up good time,” she said, remembering Harry’s letter, but before she could get farther, her aunt stopped her.