"Oh yes, their love is absolutely genuine," Dolly ran on, loyally. "Tobe could have married the daughter of a well-to-do farmer over the mountain whom he had visited several times before he met his wife. The farmer was willing, I have heard, to give them land to live on, and it might have been a match, but Tobe accidentally met Annie. She was a poor girl working in the Ridgeville cotton factory at two or three dollars a week, which she was giving to her people. She had only two dresses, the tattered bag of a thing she worked in and another which she kept for Sundays. Tobe met her and talked to her one day while he was hauling cotton to the factory, and something in her poor wretched face attracted him, or maybe it was her sweet voice, for it is as mellow as music. She wasn't well—had a cough at the time—and he had read something in a paper about the lint of a factory causing consumption, and it worried him; people say he couldn't keep from talking about it. She was on his mind constantly. He was still going to see the other girl, but he acted so oddly that she became angry with him and, to spite him, began to go with another young man. But Tobe didn't seem to care. He kept going to the factory and—well, the upshot of it was that he married Annie."
"And then the real trouble began," Mostyn said, smiling lightly.
"And actually through no fault of their own," Dolly declared. "He rented land, bought some supplies on credit, and went to work to make a crop. You ask father or Uncle John; they will tell you that Tobe Barnett was the hardest worker in this valley. But ill luck clung to him like a leach. The drouth killed his first crop, and the winter caught him in debt. Then Annie got sick—she had exposed herself to the bad weather milking a cow for a neighbor to earn a little money. Then no sooner was she up when a wagon ran over Tobe and hurt his foot so that he could hardly get about. Then the baby came, and their load of trouble was heavier than ever."
"A case of true love, without doubt," Mostyn said.
"And the prettiest thing on earth," Dolly declared. "Sometimes it seems to make their poor shack of a place fairly glow with heavenly light."
"You are a marvel to me, Dolly—you really are!" Mostyn paused, and she turned to him, a groping look of surprise on her face.
"What do you mean?" she asked.
"Why, you have such an original way of speaking," he said, somewhat abashed by her sudden demand. "I mean—that—that what you say sounds different from what one would naturally expect. Not ordinary, not commonplace; I hardly know how to express it. Really, you are quite poetic."
He saw her face fall. "I am sorry about that," she faltered. "I have been told the same thing before, and I don't like to be that way. I am afraid I read too much poetry. It fairly sings in my head when I feel deeply, as I do about Tobe and Annie, for instance, or when I have to make a speech."
"Make a speech? You?" Mostyn stared.