"If it's proper, and he's my man, you can, an' work instead of me, but I must hear them both first."
"If Walker could get you to make a speech for him, we'd all vote for him in a body," laughed Eweword; but Dawn replied—
"Oh, you, I suppose you say that to every girl."
Eweword sizzled in his blushes, while Ernest's face slightly cleared at this rebuff dealt out to another.
Grandma brought in the coffee and grumbled to Dawn about Carry's absence.
"That Larry Witcom ain't no monk, and while a girl is in my house I feel I ought to look after her. I believe in every one having liberty, but there's reason in everythink."
The girl did not appear till after the young men had gone and Dawn and I had withdrawn, but we heard grandma's remonstrance.
"That feller, I told you straight, was took up about a affair in a divorce case, an' it would be as well not to make yourself too cheap to him. I don't say as most men ain't as bad, only they're not caught and bowled out; but w'en they are made a public example of, we have to take notice of it. Marry him if you want—use your own judgment; he'll be the sort of feller who'll always have a good home, and in after years these things is always forgot, and it would be better to be married to a man that had that against him (seein' they're all the same, only they ain't found out) and could keep you comfortable, than one who was supposed to be different an' couldn't keep you. But if you ain't goin' to marry him, don't fool about with him. An' unless he gets to business an' wants marriage at once, don't take too much notice to his soft soap, as you ain't the only girl he's got on the string by a long way."
"He acknowledges about the fault he did in his young days, and he says it's terribly hard that it's always coming against him now," said Carry.
"Well, if a woman does a fault she has to pay for it, hasn't she?—that's the order of things," said grandma.