The stamp with which the Colonel's rather substantial boot just then shook the floor seemed to generate some current of force sufficient to whirl Phyllis about and send her up-stairs in an old-fashioned fit of hysteria. She was crying and talking and running all at the same time, her voice made liquid like a bird's, and yet jangling with its mixed emotions. Down fell her wavy, long, brown hair almost to her feet, one rich strand trailing over the rail as she mounted the steps, while the rustling of her muslin dress told off the springy motion of her limbs till she disappeared in the gilt-papered gloom aloft, where the windowless hall turned at right angles with the stairway.
Colonel Sommerton was smiling grimly by this time, and his iron-gray mustache quivered humorously.
“She's a little brick,” he muttered; “a chip off the old log—by zounds, she is! She means business. Got the bit in her teeth, and fairly splitting the air!” He chuckled raucously. “Let her go; she'll soon tire out.”
Sommerton Place, a picturesque old mansion, as mansions have always gone in north Georgia, stood in a grove of oaks on a hill-top overlooking a little mountain town, beyond which uprose a crescent of blue peaks against a dreamy summer sky. Behind the house a broad plantation rolled its billow-like ridges of corn and cotton.
The Colonel went out on the veranda and lit a cigar, after breaking two or three matches that he nervously scratched on a column.
This was the first quarrel that he had ever had with Phyllis.
Mrs. Sommerton had died when Phyllis was twelve years old, leaving the little girl to be brought up in a boarding-school in Atlanta. The widowed man did not marry again, and when his daughter came home, six months before the opening of our story, it was natural that he should see nothing but loveliness in the fair, bright, only child of his happy wedded life, now ended forever.
The reader must have taken for granted that the person under discussion in the conversation touched upon at the outset of this writing was a young man; but Tom Bannister stood for more than the sum of the average young man's values. He was what in our republic is recognized as a promising fellow, bright, magnetic, shifty, well forward in the neologies of society, business, and politics, a born leader in a small way, and as ambitious as poverty and a brimming self-esteem could make him. From his humble law-office window he had seen Phyllis pass along the street in the old Sommerton carriage, and had fallen in love as promptly as possible with her plump, lissome form and pretty face.
He sought her acquaintance, avoided with cleverness a number of annoying barriers, assaulted her heart, and won it, all of which stood as mere play when compared with climbing over the pride and prejudice of Colonel Sommerton. For Bannister was nobody in a social way, as viewed from the lofty top of the hill at Sommerton Place; indeed, all of his kinspeople were mountaineers, honest, it is true, but decidedly woodsy, who tilled stony acres in a pocket beyond the first blue ridge yonder. His education seemed good, but it had been snatched from the books by force, with the savage certainty of grip which belongs to genius.
Colonel Sommerton, having unbounded confidence in Phyllis's aristocratic breeding, would not open his eyes to the attitude of the young people until suddenly it came into his head that possibly the almost briefless plebeian lawyer had ulterior designs while climbing the hill, as he was doing noticeably often, from town to Sommerton Place. But when this thought arrived the Colonel was prompt to act. He called up the subject at once, and we have seen the close of his interview with Phyllis.