“You must do nothing of the sort, my dear. The place and the furnishings belong to him legally.”
“I don’t care, Auntie. He has no right to them. I shall hate him. Why, he owns the very bed I sleep in and my maple bureau and——”
“You forget, Holly, that those things were bought after your father died and do not belong to his estate.”
“Then they’re really mine, after all? Very well, Auntie dear, I shan’t hate him, then; at least, not so much.”
“I trust you will not hate him at all,” responded Miss India, with a smile. “Being an invalid, as he is, we must——”
“Shucks!” exclaimed Holly. “I dare say he’s just making believe so we won’t put poison in his coffee!”
In the middle of the afternoon, what time Miss India composed herself to slumber and silence reigned over Waynewood, Holly found a book and sought the fig-tree. The book, for having been twice read, proved none too enthralling, and presently it had dropped unheeded to the ground and Holly, leaning comfortably back against the branches, was day-dreaming once more. The sound of footsteps on the garden path roused her, and she peered forth just as the intruder began his half circuit of the rose-bed.
Afterwards Holly called herself stupid for not having guessed the identity of the intruder at once. And yet, it seems to me that she was very excusable. Robert Winthrop had been pictured to her as an invalid, and invalids in Holly’s judgment were persons who lay supinely in easy chairs, lived on chicken broth, guava jelly and calomel, and were alternately irritatingly resigned or maddeningly petulant. The expected invalid had also been described as middle-aged, a term capable of wide interpretation and one upon which the worst possible construction is usually placed. The Major had suggested fifty; Holly with unconscious pessimism imagined sixty. Add to this that Winthrop was not expected before the morrow, and that Holly’s acquaintance with the inhabitants of the country north of Mason and Dixon’s line was of the slightest and that not of the sort to prepossess her in their favor, and I think she may be absolved from the charge of stupidity. For the stranger whose advent in the garden had aroused her from her dreams looked to be under forty, was far from matching Holly’s idea of an invalid, and looked quite unlike the one or two Northerners she had seen. To be sure the man in the garden walked slowly and a trifle languidly, but for that matter so did many of Holly’s townsfolk. And when he paused at last with one foot on the lower step his breath was coming a bit raggedly and his face was too pale for perfect health. But these facts Holly failed to observe.
What she did observe was that the stranger was rather tall, quite erect, broad of shoulder and deep of chest, somewhat too thin for the size of his frame, with a pleasant, lean face of which the conspicuous features were high cheek-bones, a straightly uncompromising nose and a pair of nice eyes of some shade neither dark nor light. He wore a brown mustache which, contrary to the Southern custom, was trimmed quite short; and when he lifted his hat a moment later Holly saw that his hair, dark brown in color, had retreated well away from his forehead and was noticeably sprinkled with white at the temples. As for his attire, it was immaculate; black derby, black silk tie knotted in a four-in-hand and secured with a small pearl pin, well-cut grey sack suit and brown leather shoes. In a Southerner Holly would have thought such carefulness of dress foppish; in fact, as it was, she experienced a tiny contempt for it even as she acknowledged that the result was far from displeasing. Further observations and conclusions were cut short by the stranger, who advanced toward her with hat in hand and a puzzled smile.
“How do you do?” said Winthrop.