else she
feared. Hoping to relieve her and lighten the situation, I forced myself
to smile on the young man as I said:

"Why don't you raise melons yourself? I think if I possessed your land I
should be anxious to raise everything I could on it."

"Oh, you're a woman!" he retorted, almost roughly. "It's good business
for women; and for men, too, perhaps, who love to see fruit hang, but I
only care to eat it."

"Don't," Lucetta put in, but not with the vigor I had expected.

"I like to hunt, train dogs, and enjoy other people's fruit," he
laughed, with a nod at the blushing Lucetta. "I don't see any use in a
man's putting himself out for things he can get for the asking. Life's
too short for such folly. I mean to have a good time while I'm on this
blessed sphere."

"William!"

The cry was irresistible, yet it was not the cry I had been looking for.
Painful as was this exhibition of his stupidity and utter want of
feeling, it was not the one thing she stood in dread of, or why was her
protest so much weaker than her appearance had given token of?

"Oh!" he shouted in great amusement, while she shrunk back with a
horrified look. "Lucetta don't like to hear me say that. She thinks a
man ought to work, plow, harrow, dig, make a slave of himself, to keep
up a place that's no good anyway. But I tell her that work is something
she'll never get out of me. I was born a gentleman, and a gentleman I
will live if the place tumbles down over our heads. Perhaps it would be
the best way to get rid of it. Then I could go live with Mr. Trohm, and
have melons from early morn till late at night." And again his coarse
laugh rang out.

This, or was it his words, seemed to rouse her as nothing had done
before. Thrusting out her hand, she laid it on his mouth, with a look of
almost frenzied appeal at the woman who was standing at his back.

"Mr. William, how can you!" that woman protested; and when he would have
turned upon her angrily, she leaned over and whispered in his ear a few
words that seemed to cow him, for he gave a short grunt through his
sister's trembling fingers and, with a shrug of his heavy shoulders,
subsided into silence.

To all this I was a simple spectator, but I did not soon forget a single
feature of the scene.

The remainder of the dinner passed quietly, William and myself eating
with more or less heartiness, Lucetta tasting nothing at all. In mercy
to her I declined coffee, and as soon as William gave tok