"Didn't I say so?" answered Mason, chafing under her open contempt. "But war cannot be carried on without funds, and Asteroid let into me heavily." He was playing for the odd trick now.
"I expected that," said the dowager contemptuously. "How much?"
"Well, say two hundred," hesitated Lind, for he expected a controversy—"for first impressions."
She only took out her portemonnaie and said, "See that you earn it."
"You bet! I mean, Thank ye, aunt," muttering as he left the room, "Confounded old cow with the crumpled horn! but who thought she would milk so easy?"
Elated with having "made a raise," he went strutting and breathing down the avenue, clanking his chains and thinking of his little cousin as already won.
But that was the way of the dowager, this Queen Catharine of the Browns. If she heard of derelictions from loyalty, she did not stop to mediate and discuss, but, like a vigorous ruler, took prompt means to put them down. We shall see how she succeeded, and what befel her chief marshal in this campaign.
CHAPTER II.
The dowager's chiding laugh, low and musical, at that festive gathering of little Sue's, was at once rebuke and pardon for the past. It inspired the music: the deft fiddler touched the speaking strings with firmer bow, and the clashing violins, tinkling triangle and the shrill bubbling of the quill pipe rolled mellowing through the halls and under arches of cedar and rosebush where lovers strolled among the shrubbery. The dowager sat gossiping in the broad hall. Such talk, too! with a flavor of old bellehood in it, when Mr. Clay's graceful form visited the saloons and Prentice and Wallace were young and dashing poets of society. She quoted with quaint accentuation mellow old-fashioned verses inscribed to her at those old merry meetings, and Time rolled up his curtain to feelings and fashions of thought like the faint musk of old pressed rose-leaves. Ah me! I wrote some verses myself t'other day—little verses indeed, and for a very little girl. But I think when the brain that thought and the heart that felt so are long dust, some old, old grandam shall take them from her reticule and say to great-grandchildren, "He wrote them for me when I was but a little girl," and across the ashes of three quarters of a century the dead lips shall speak again to hearts as kind and tender. The seed sowed in thorny labor may be choked up, and, barren of tears, the dry rocks of time wither the sweet old fancies I have written, but this little seed by the wayside shall lift its tiny sheaf, and I too shall have my small harvest of immortality.