safer with you there. I
will send over in the morning to learn how he passed the night. Good-by,
Mr. Carrington." And still refusing to meet his eyes, she gave him her
hand.

But Carrington did not quit the mouth of the lane until she had crossed
between the great fields of waving corn, and he had seen her pass up
the hillside beyond to the oak grove, where the four massive chimneys
of Belle Plain house showed their gray stone copings among the foliage.
With this last glimpse of her he turned away.

CHAPTER XXI. THICKET POINT

It WAS a point with Mr. Ware to see just as little as possible of Betty.
He had no taste for what he called female chatter. A sane interest in
the price of cotton or pork he considered the only rational test of
human intelligence, and Betty evinced entire indifference where those
great staples were concerned, hence it was agreeable to him to have most
of his meals served in his office.

At first Betty had sought to adapt herself to his somewhat peculiar
scheme of life, but Tom had begged her not to regard him, his movements
from hour to hour were cloaked in uncertainty. The man who had to
overlook the labor of eighty or ninety field hands was the worst sort of
a slave himself; the niggers knew when they could sit down to a meal; he
never did.

But for all his avoidance of Betty, he in reality kept the closest kind
of a watch on her movements, and when he learned that she had visited
Charley Norton--George, the groom, was the channel through which this
information reached him--he was both scandalized and disturbed. He felt
the situation demanded some sort of a protest.

"Isn't it just hell the way a woman can worry you?" he lamented, as
he hurried up the path from the barns to the house. He found Betty at
supper.

"I thought I'd have a cup of tea with you, Bet--what else have you
that's good?" he inquired genially, as he dropped into a chair.

"That was nice of you; we don't see very much of each other, do we,
Tom?" said Betty pleasantly.

Mr. Ware twisted his features, on which middle age had rested an
untender hand, into a smile.

"When a man undertakes to manage a place like Belle Plain his work's
laid out for him, Betty, and an old fellow like me is pretty apt to go
one of two ways; either he takes to hard living to keep himself in trim,
or he pampers himself soft."

"But you aren't old, Tom!"

"I wish I were sure of seeing forty-five or even forty-eight again--but
I'm n