“Did you wish to see me?” asked Marion, looking inquiringly at the man. Page 69. Miss Ashton’s New Pupil.
“Perhaps it’s your father. Hurry! hurry!” said Gladys, thinking how she would hurry if her own father had been there.
Thus encouraged, Marion, with heightened color and a rapidly beating heart, followed Etta down into the parlor, and there, still seated on the edge of his chair, twirling an old felt hat rapidly round between two big, red hands, she saw a tall, lean man in a suit of coarse gray clothes. He had grizzly, iron-gray hair, stubby white whiskers, a pale-blue eye, a brown face streaked with red.
He sat a little nearer the front edge of his chair as she entered the room, and waited for her to speak. Evidently he was not prepared for the kind of Western girl he saw before him.
“Did you wish to see me?” looking inquiringly at him.
“Be you Marion Parke?”
“Yes.”
“I am Abijah Jones, your cousin, three times removed; your great-aunt Betty told me to come out here and make a call on you. She’s set on seeing you at Thanksgiving, and I guess you’d better humor her, for she took a spite at your father cause he wouldn’t farm it, and would have an education; but she allers kind of favored him more than the rest of us, and has allers hankered after him. That’s why I’m here.”