“The Grange picnic, father, tra-la-la! I’m going with Miss Josey, folderolloll!”
“Oho! Devilho gwine ter be thar, I s’pose?”
“Yes, indeed! Hail, all hail! La-la-tra-la!”
“Make him toe the mark, darter!”
Mell’s song abruptly ceased.
To make an individual of Mr. Jerome Devonhough’s subtle intellect and masterful will toe the mark was going to be no easy matter. He was far from being an exact science whose formula could be reduced to the touchstone of certainty. Softer were his ways, and more complex his web, the fabric of his purpose more difficult to trace, than the intricate meshes of this cob-webbery lace she was basting in the neck of her dress. Nevertheless, every stitch of her needle fastened down her gathering intentions to the figure of her mind. Jerome must have done with these evasions; he must tell her the truth, and the whole truth; he must henceforth act right up to the notch, or else she would put an end to everything between them, and in the future have nothing whatever to do with him. Several measures such as these, rightly enforced, would, she believed, bring the most slippery Lothario in existence down on his knees at a woman’s feet, If the man really loved the woman. If Jerome really loved Mell.
“If, Si, Wenn, Se!” vociferated Mell, stamping her fiery little foot. “Why was it ever put into articulate speech?”
She knew it, this highly educated girl, in so many languages, and could not blot it out in a single one of them! Is not mere human knowledge a kind of blunt tool?
But she was ready, bright and early, the next morning, so promptly ready that Miss Josey commended her in unstinted terms.
“Had it been Clara,” said Miss Josey, as Mell sprang lightly into the little basket phaeton, “she’d have kept me waiting, probably, a whole hour without a scruple of compunction! Come, we will go to the Bigge House first for some things I must carry.”