It is scarcely necessary to say that Letty’s fortune was made as far as the Newport season went. Her opinions of people and things at Newport underwent a sudden change when she began to be treated with great attention. She triumphantly confided to both Farebrother and Sir Archy that she did not mean to let the Colonel start for Virginia until he had spent all his money, and she had worn out all her clothes, and would be obliged to go home to be washed and mended. Meanwhile she flirted infamously and impartially with both, after a manner indigenous to the region south of Mason and Dixon’s line.
III
THE period so frankly mentioned by Letty, when the party from Corbin Hall would get to the end of their financial tether, arrived with surprising promptness. But something still more surprising happened. The Colonel quite unexpectedly had dumped upon him the vast and imposing sum of two thousand dollars. This astonishing fact was communicated to Farebrother one sunny day when he and Letty were watching a game of tennis at the Casino.
“Do you know,” said she, turning two sparkling eyes on him from under her large white hat, and tilting her parasol back gaily, “we are not going away, after all.”
“Thank the Lord,” answered Farebrother, with fervent irreverence.
He had found out that he could talk any amount of sentiment to Letty with impunity. In fact, she rather demanded excessive sentiment, of which she nevertheless believed not one word. Farebrother, who had seen something of Southern girls, very quickly and accurately guessed that it was the sort of thing Letty had been used to. But he was amused and charmed to find, that along with the most inveterate and arrant coquetry, she combined a modesty that amounted to prudery, and a reserve of manner in certain respects which kept him at an inexorable distance. He could whisper soft nonsense in Letty’s ear all day long, and she would listen with an artless enjoyment that was inexpressibly diverting to Farebrother. But when he once attempted to touch her hand in putting on her wrap, Letty turned on him with an angry stare that disconcerted him utterly. It was not the surprise of an ignorant girl, but the thorough resentment of an offended woman. Farebrother took care not to transgress in that way again.
Letty fully expected him to express rapturous delight at her announcement, and was not disappointed. “It’s very strange,” she continued, twirling her parasol and leaning forward in her chair; “grandpapa’s father lent some money a long time ago,—I think the Corbins got some money by hook or by crook in 1814,—and they lent it all out, and ever since then they have been borrowing, as far as I can make out. Well, some of it was on a mortgage that was foreclosed the other day, so grandpapa says, and he got two thousand dollars.”
Letty held off to watch the effect of this stunning statement. Two thousand dollars was a great deal of money to her. Farebrother, arrant hypocrite that he was, had learned the important lesson of promptly adopting Letty’s view of everything, and did it so thoroughly that sometimes he overdid it.
“Why, that’s a pot of money,” he said gravely. “It’s quite staggering to contemplate.”