"I'll cut that out, I reckon"—the Colonel smiled in spite of himself. Langdon was such a copy of what he had been at the same age that it seemed, under stress of certain memories, almost wrong to reprove him. "No, I've sworn off from cards, and that's one thing I want you to let alone. I don't want to hear of your having any more of those all-night carouses here, leaving bullet-holes in your grandfather's portrait, as you and your dissolute gang did the last time I was away. It's a wonder to me you and those fellows didn't burn the house down."
At this juncture Langdon was glad to see the overseer of the plantation on the veranda, and the Colonel went out to give him some instructions.
Two nights later, when he had seen his father off at the door and turned back into the great, partly lighted house, Langdon set about thinking how he could spend the evening and rid himself of the abiding sense of loneliness that had beset him. He might stroll over to Wilson's store, but the farmers he met there would be far from congenial, for he was not popular with many of them, and unless he could meet, which was unlikely at night, some drummer who would play poker freely with the funds of the house he represented against Langdon's ready promises to pay, his walk would be fruitless. No, he would not go to the store, he decided; and still he was in no mood, at so early an hour, for the solitude of his room or the antiquated library, from the shelves of which frowned the puritanical books of his Presbyterian ancestors. Irresolute, he had wandered to the front veranda again, and as he stood looking eastward he espied, through the trees across the fields and meadows, a light. It was Jane Hemingway's kitchen candle, and the young man's pulse beat more rapidly as he gazed at it. He had occasionally seen Virginia outside the house of evenings, and had stolen chats with her. Perhaps he might have such luck again. In any case, nothing would be lost in trying, and the walk would kill time. Besides, he was sure the girl was beginning to like him; she now trusted him more, and seemed always willing to talk to him. She believed he loved her; who could doubt it when he himself had been surprised at his tenderness and flights of eloquence when inspired by her rare beauty and sweetness? Sometimes he believed that his feeling for the beautiful, trustful girl was a love that would endure, but when he reflected on the difference in their stations in life he had grave and unmanly doubts. As he walked along the road, the light of Jane's candle, like the glow of a fire-fly, intermittently appearing and disappearing ahead of him through the interstices of the trees and foliage, the memory of the gossip about his father and Ann Boyd flashed unpleasantly upon him. Was he, after all, following his parent's early bent? Was family history repeating itself? But when the worst was said about that affair, who had been seriously injured? Certainly not the easy-going Colonel, surely not the sturdy pariah herself, who had, somehow, turned her enforced isolation to such purpose that she was rich in the world's goods and to all appearances cared not a rap for public opinion.
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That day had been the gloomiest in Virginia's life. Early in the morning Jane had gone to Darley for the twentieth time to try to borrow the money with which to defray her expenses to Atlanta. She had failed again, and came home at dusk absolutely dejected.
"It's all up with me!" she groaned, as she sank heavily into a chair in front of the cheerful fire Virginia had in readiness, and pushed her worn shoes out to the flames. "I went from one old friend to another, telling them my condition, but they seemed actually afraid of me, treating me almost like a stranger. They all told tales of need, although they seemed to have plenty of everything. Judge Crane met me in Main Street and told me I could appeal to the county fund and get on the pauper list, but without offering to help me; he said he knew I'd almost rather die than fall so low. No, I'll not do that, Virginia. That's what would tickle Ann Boyd and some others powerfully."
With lagging steps and a heart like lead, Virginia went about preparing the simple meal. Her mother ate only hot buttered toast with boiled milk on it to soften it for her toothless gums, but the fair cook scarcely touched food at all. Her mother's grewsome affliction was in the sensitive girl's mind all through each successive day, and even at night her sleep was broken by intermittent dreams of this or that opportunity to raise the coveted money. Sometimes it was the jovial face of a crude, penniless neighbor who laughed carelessly as he handed her a cumbersome roll of bank-bills; again she would find a great heap of gold glittering in the sun, only to wake with her delicate fingers tightly clasped on nothing at all—to wake that she might lie and listen to Jane's sighs and moans as the old woman crouched over the ash-buried coals to light a tallow-dip to look, for the thousandth time, at the angry threat of fate upon her withered breast.
To-night, greatly wearied by her long ride and being on her feet so long, Jane went to bed early, and, when she was alone, Virginia, with a mental depression that had become almost physical pain, went out and sat on the front door-step in the moonlight. That very day a plan of her own in regard to the raising of the money had fallen to earth. She had heard of the munificent gift Luke King had made to his mother, and she determined that she would go to him, lay the case before him, and pledge herself to toil for him in any capacity till he was repaid; but when she had gone as far in the direction of the newly purchased farm as the Hincock Spring, she met Mary Bruce in a new dress and hat, and indirectly discovered that King had given up his last dollar of ready money to secure the property for his people. No, she would not take her own filial troubles to a young man who was so nobly battling with his own. At any other moment she might have had time to admire King's sacrifice, but her mind was too full of her own depressing problem to give thought to that of another. Her sharp reproof to him for his neglect of his mother during his absence in the West flitted through her memory, and at a less troubled moment she would have seen how ridiculously unjust her childish words must have sounded.
As she sat, weighted down with these things, she heard a step down the road. It was slow and leisured, if not deliberately cautious. It was accompanied by a persistent spark of fire which flitted always on a straight line, in view and out, among the low bushes growing close to the fence along the roadside. A moment later a handsome face in the flare of a burning cigar appeared, smiling confidently at the gate. It was Langdon Chester.
"Come out here," he said, in a soft, guarded voice. "I want to see you."