t affable friendship. Rose
Mary felt in a beaming mood, and the Honorable Gid came under the
shower of her affability.

"Do have that chair by the door, and let me give you a glass of milk,"
she hastened to add as she took up a cup and started for the crocks
with a still greater accession of hospitality. "Sweet or buttermilk?"
she paused to inquire over her shoulder.

"Either handed by you would be sweet" answered the Senator with
praiseworthy ponderosity, and he shook out the smile veil until the
very roots of his hair became agitated.

"Yes, Mr. Rucker says my buttermilk tastes like sweet milk with honey
added," laughed Rose Mary, dimpling from over the tall jar. "He says
that because I always pour cream into it for him, and Mrs. Rucker
won't because she says it is extravagant. But I think a poet ought to
have a dash of cream in his life, if just to make the poetry run
smoother--and orators, too," she added as she poured half a ladleful
of the golden top milk into the foaming glass in her hand and gave it
to the Senator, who received it with a trembling hand and gulped it
down desperately; for this once in his life the Honorable Gideon
Newsome was completely and entirely embarrassed. For many a year he
had had at his command florid and extravagant figures of speech which,
cast in any one of a dozen of his dulcet modulations of voice, were
warranted to tell on even the most stubborn masculine intelligence,
and ought to have melted the feminine heart at the moment of
utterance, but at this particular moment they all failed him, and he
was left high and dry on the coast of courtship with only the bare
question available for use.

"Miss Rose Mary," he blurted out without any preamble at all, and
drops of the sweat of an agony of anxiety stood out all over the wide
brow, "I have been talking with Mr. Alloway, and I have come to you to
see if we can't all get together and settle this mortgage question to
the profit of all concerned. I lent him that money six years ago with
the intention of trying to get you to be my wife just as soon as you
recovered from your--your natural grief over the way things had gone
with you and young Alloway. I have waited longer than I had any
intention of doing, because I was absorbed in this political career I
had begun on, but now I see it is time to settle matters, as the farm
is running us all into debt, and I'm very much in need of you as a
wife. I hope you see it in that light, and th