"Well, I'm a Georgia cracker," he declared next, with desperate calmness, "and she's right in thinking I come cheap."
"She didn't mean it like that!"
"I don't know what she meant," he went on wearily. "I don't half understand her. The only time we get along together is when neither of us says a word."
Mrs. Pickens laughed, and Dick, rising sheepishly to his feet, walked to the open window. When he turned back he seemed his usual self again.
"I'll be out of the way soon enough now," he said. "I'm off on the road to-morrow."
"Yes, dear."
"You couldn't go to her room by and by, could you, and tell her I'm sorry I made such a rumpus?"
"Of course. And I will say, Dick, that I think this time she is as much to blame as you. You only ran down the darkies, but she——"
"She lambasted me, all right. I know I'm not her kind. But what does she think she's going to get?" His anger flared up again for a moment. "Does she expect to find a prince in that precious school of hers? Or perhaps she thinks she'll meet him when she goes to work in Wall Street. That's so, she might, and he'd fall to her, all right."
He grew jealous at his picture and fear overtook him; for as Mrs. Pickens had said, there was more than one beau for a pretty girl, and Hertha was more than pretty—she was a woman whom a man could not forget.