Molly beamed with pleasure. “Ah, you see how wonderful mother is. I thought you would appreciate her. She likes you, too, Professor Green. Mother says she believes she understands boys better than girls and can enter into their feelings more.”
“Oh, what am I saying?” thought Molly. “I wonder what the Wellington girls would say if they could know I forgot and as good as called their Professor of English a boy! Well, he does look quite boyish out of doors, with his hat on.”
They strolled on down toward the brook, Molly patting each tree as they passed and telling some little incident of her childhood.
“I truly believe you love every one of these trees. You touch them as lovingly as you do President or the dogs, and look at them as fondly as you do at old Aunt Mary.”
“Indeed, I do; and, as for this little stream, it makes to me the sweetest music in the world.”
“Miss Molly, when I build my little bungalow, will you come and have lunch with me as you used to with your brothers in the old castle? I’ll promise you not to let you eat at the second table as you did when you took breakfast with me last Christmas.”
They both laughed at the thought of that morning; and Molly remembered that it was then that she had overheard Professor Green tell his housekeeper of his apple orchard out in Kentucky, and had realized for the first time that it was he who had bought the orchard at Chatsworth.
“Indeed, I will take lunch with you, and would like to cook it, too, as I did your breakfast that cold morning. Do you know, when you came downstairs and I peeped at you through the crack in the pantry door, you looked and sounded almost as fierce as the mob of colored men who came hungry from Aunt Clay’s last week? The nice breakfast I fixed for you seemed to soften your temper just as mother’s buttermilk did the darkies’. Aunt Mary says, ‘White men and black men is all the same on the inside, and all of them is Hungarians.’”
Edwin Green laughed, as he always did when Molly got on the subject of Aunt Mary. The old woman was a never failing source of wonder and amusement to him; and Molly mimicked her so well that you could almost see her short, fat figure with her head tied up in a bandanna handkerchief, vigorously nodding to punctuate each epigram.
“Next winter I hope to have my sister with me at Wellington, and she will see that this ‘Hungarian’ is fed better than my housekeeper has. You will come to us a great deal, I hope. I am overjoyed that you are to take the postgraduate course. That was the one pleasant thing your aunt, Mrs. Clay, had to tell me when I conversed with her at the wedding, and she little dreamed how pleasant it was, or I doubt her giving me that joy.”