"No; it was with her eye. He declared to me most solemnly that the girl winked at him!"
Griswold was aware that Miss Osborne's interest in Ardmore cooled perceptibly.
"Oh!" she said, with that delightful intonation with which a woman utterly extinguishes a sister.
"I shouldn't have told you that," said Griswold, guiltily aware of falling temperature. "He is capable of following a winking eye at a perfectly respectful distance for a hundred years, and of being entertained all the time by the joy of pursuit."
"It seems very unusual," said Barbara, with cold finality.
Griswold remembered this talk as, the next day, aboard the train bound for Turner Court House, the seat of Mingo County, South Carolina, he pondered a telegram he had received from Ardmore. He read and re-read this message, chewing cigars and scowling at the landscape, and the cause of his perturbation of spirit may be roughly summarized in these words:
On leaving the executive mansion the night before, he had studied maps in his room at the Saluda House, and carefully planned his campaign. He had talked by telephone with the prosecuting attorney of Mingo County, and found that official politely responsive. So much had gone well. Then the juxtaposition of Ardmore's estate to the border, and the possible use of the house as headquarters, struck in upon him. He would, after all, generously take Ardmore into the game, and they would uphold the honor and dignity of the great commonwealth of South Carolina together. The keys of all Ardmore's houses were, so to speak, in Griswold's pocket, and invitations were unnecessary between them; yet, at Atlanta Ardmore had made a point of asking Griswold down to help while away the tedium of Mrs. Atchison's house party, and as a matter of form Griswold had wired from Columbia, advising Ardmore of his unexpected descent.
Even in case Ardmore should still be abroad in pursuit of the winking eye, the doors of the huge house would be open to Griswold, who had entered there so often as the owner's familiar friend. These things he pondered deeply as he read and re-read Ardmore's reply to his message, a reply which was plainly enough dated at Ardsley, but which, he could not know, had really been written in caboose 0186 as it lay on a siding in the southeastern yards at Raleigh, and thence despatched to the manager at Ardsley, with instructions to forward it as a new message to Griswold at Columbia. The chilling words thus flung at him were:
Professor Henry Maine Griswold,
Saluda House, Columbia, S. C.:I am very sorry, old man, but I can not take you in just now. Scarlet fever is epidemic among my tenants, and I could not think of exposing you to danger. As soon as the accursed plague passes I want to have you down.
Ardmore.