uld have eaten for supper."

"It's first-rate work for the muscles, Ben," remarked George, flinging
an armful of wood on the brick floor, and kneeling beside the stove to
kindle a fire in the old ashes. "I haven't a doubt but it's better for
the back and arms than horseback riding. All the same," he added, poking
vigorously at the smouldering embers, "I'm going to wallop that boy as
soon as I've got this fire started."

"You won't have time to do that until you've delivered the day's
washing," rejoined Sally, with merriment.

"Yes, I shall. I'll stop on my way--that boy comes first," returned
George with a grim, if humorous, determination.

This humour, this lightness, and above all this gallantry, which was so
much a part of the older civilisation to which they belonged, wrought
upon my disordered nerves with a feeling of anger. Here, at last, I had
run against that "something else" of the Blands', apart from wealth,
apart from position, apart even from blood, of which the General had
spoken. Miss Mitty might go in rags and do her own cooking, he had said,
but as long as she possessed this "something else," that supported her,
she would preserve to the end, in defiance of circumstances, her
terrible importance.

"You know I don't care a bit what I eat, Sally!" I blurted out, in a
temper.

"Well, you may not, dear, but George and I do," she rejoined, pinning
the white stuff on a clothes-line she had stretched between the door and
the window, "we are both interested, you see, in getting you back to
work. There's the door-bell, George. You may wash your hands at the sink
and answer it. If it's the butter, bring it to me, and if it's a caller,
let him wait, while I turn down my sleeves."

Rising from his knees, George washed his hands at the sink, and went out
along the brick walk to the house, while I stood in the doorway, under
the shadow of the pink crape myrtle, and made a vow in my heart.

"Sally," I said at last in the agony of desperation, "you ought to have
married George."

With her arms still upraised to the clothes-line, she looked round at me
over her shoulder.

"He is useful in an emergency," she admitted; "but, after all, the
emergency isn't the man, you know."

I was about to press the point home to conscience, when George,
returning along the walk, announced with the mock solemnity of a footman
in livery, that the callers were Dr. Theophilus and the General, who
awaited us in the sitting-room.