"I could tell you, Miss Lucy,"—mindful of the pair of sharp ears behind the door, he lowered his voice—"I could tell you how you could repay me for the little I've done for you, ef you'd listen to me!"
But Miss Lucy had fled, and had closed the door softly behind her.
CHAPTER VII
Rivals
"Every man in the time of courtship, puts on a behavior like my correspondent's holiday suit!"
The month of February was bitterly cold, and a deep snow lay unmelted for three weeks,—a condition of weather that seriously hindered interchange of social calls on the Silver Run creek. The last Sunday morning, however, brought a thaw that made it possible for the socially inclined, comfortably to stir out.
After the James' breakfast, Mr. Lindsay, according to his every Sunday's custom between milking times, dressed himself in his best black suit and his shining Sunday shoes, and with the more than a few white threads that were beginning to come in his hair and mustache, decently colored, and a suggestion of perfume about him, came into the sitting-room.
Miss Nancy, whose Sabbath attire was a change from a soiled brown calico to a similar unattractive clean one, professed to disapprove of this Sunday's dressy toilet, and when her sister came into the kitchen, dressed in a pretty maroon woolen house waist (one of the "remnant" waists), her second-best black woolen skirt, and wearing her watch, with its slender chain, and with the white threads in her hair concealed in a manner similar to Mr. Lindsay's, she raised her voice in sarcastic reproof.