I oughtn't to have to
tell you that."

"You don't," Doctor Tom hastened to answer as he smiled down on Mother.
"I only spoke as I did about Miss Wingate because you see she is--well,
what we would call a very great lady and I wouldn't have her think that
I did not realize that-?"

"Well, you can do as you choose," answered Mother placidly as she
prepared to take her departure to see to the finishing up of the
supper, "but I ain't a-letting no foolish pride hold my heart back from
my honey-bird. Love's my bread of life and I offers it free, high or
low. Come on and see how you like that cheese fixing she's done made
for you."

CHAPTER III

THE PEONY-GIRL AND THE BUMPKIN

"There's just no doubt about it, if Tom Mayberry weren't my own son and
I had occasion to know better I'd think he had teeth in his heels, from
the looks of his socks. Every week Cindy darns them a spell and then I
take a hand at it. Just look, Elinory, did you ever see a worser hole
than this?" As Mother Mayberry spoke she held up for Miss Wingate's
interested inspection a fine, dark blue sock. They were sitting on the
porch in the late afternoon and the singer lady was again at work on a
bit of wardrobe for the doll daughter of her friend Eliza.

"How does he manage such--such awful ones?" asked Miss Wingate with a
laugh.

"That you can't never prove by me," answered his mother as she slipped
a small gourd into the top of the sock and drew a thread through her
needle.

"Sometimes I wish the time when I could turn him barefooted from May to
November had never gone by. But a-wishing they children back in years
is a habit most mothers have got in common, I reckon. When he's away
from me I dream him often at all ages, but it's mostly from six to
eleven I seem to want him. When he were six, with Doctor Mayberry gone,
I took to steadying myself by Tom and at eleven I made up my mind to
give him up."

"Give him up?" asked Miss Wingate as she raised her eyes from her work.
"I don't think you seem to have given him up to any serious extent."
And she smiled as she turned her head in the direction of the office
wing, from which came a low whistled tune, jerkily and absorbedly
rendered.

"Oh, he don't belong to me no more," answered his mother in a placid
tone of voice as she rocked to and fro with her work. "I fought out all
that fight when I took my resolve. I just figured something like this,
Pa Lovell had been a-doctoring on Harpeth Hi