Andrew the Glad | Page 8

ruffled his auburn forelock with a gesture of
perplexity.
"Yes," answered the major, "Caroline Darrah Brown is here and is, I
hope, going to stay for a time at least. I wanted to tell you about it
yesterday but I hadn't seen her and I--"
"And, David dear," interrupted Mrs. Buchanan who had been standing

by with shining eyes waiting for an opening to break in on Kildare's
astonishment with some of the details of her happiness over her
discovery. "I didn't tell you last night for the major didn't want me to,
but she is so lovely! She's your inherited friend, for your mother and
hers were devoted to each other. I do want you to love her and
everybody help me to make her feel at home. Don't mind about her
father being a--you know a--a carpetbagger. Three of her Darrah
grandfathers have been governors of this state; just think about them
and don't talk about her father or any carpet--you know. Please be good
to her!"
"Be good to her," exclaimed David heartily, "just watch me! I am
loving her already for making you so happy by this down-from-the-sky
drop, Mrs. Matilda. And we'll all be careful about the carpetbags; won't
even mention a rug; lots of talk can be got out of the dead governors
I'm thinking. My welcome's getting more enthusiastic every moment.
When can I hand it to her?"
"She's resting now and I think she ought to be quiet for to-day, because
she has been under a strain," answered Mrs. Buchanan as she glanced
tenderly at a closed door across the hall. "Oh, I'm so glad you think you
are going to love her in spite of--of--"
"The Brown graft on the Darrah family tree?" finished David
quizzically. His eyes danced with delighted amusement across her puffs
at the major as he added, "Must have been silversmiths dangling on
most of his ancestral branches, judging from his propensity for making
dollars; a million or two, stocks, bonds, any kind of flimflam,--eh,
Major?"
"Yes," answered the major as he blew a ring of smoke into the air, "yes,
just about that; any kind of flimflam. And I can not conceive of Peters
Brown rejoicing at having thirty thousand of those dollars put into an In
Memoriam to the women who sniffed at him and his carpetbags for a
good twenty years after the war. But the child doesn't take any of that
in. Those were twenty rich years he put in in reconstructing us, but
when he took those same heavy carpetbags North he took Mary
Caroline Darrah, the prettiest woman in the county with him. This

girl--as I have said before, isn't love a strange thing? And you say the
populace was astonished?"
"Almost to the point of paralyzation," answered David as he filled a
stray pipe with some of the major's most choice heart-leaf tobacco.
"But we managed to open up the picture show all right. The entire hive
of busy art-bees was there in a queer kind of clothes; but proud of it.
They acted as if we were dirt under their feet. They smiled on the
whole glad-crowd of us with pity and let us rave over the wrong
pictures. The portrait of Mrs. Peyton Kendrick by the great Susie Carrie
Snow is--er--well, a little more of it shows than seems natural about the
left off arm, but it's a Susie Carrie all right. You ought to have gone,
Major, you would take with the art-gang, but we didn't; we were too
afraid of them. After we had been shooed in front of most of the
pictures and told how to see things in them that weren't there at all, Hob
Capers said:
"'Let's all go down to the University Club and get drunk to forget 'em.'
That's why Mrs. Matilda came home so late."
"And I want Hobson to be nice to her too," continued Mrs. Buchanan as
if she had not been interrupted in planning for her guest. "And Tom and
Peyton Kendrick. I'll ask them to come and see her right away."
"Don't! Wait a bit, Mrs. Matilda," exclaimed David. "Hob saw a
mysterious girl in an orchid hat out in the park day before yesterday.
He says his heart creaked with expansion at just the glimpse of a chin
he got from under her veil. Suppose she's the girl. Let him have first
innings."
"David," remarked the major, "flag the sun, moon and stars in their
courses and signal time to reverse a day or a year, but don't try to turn
aside a maker of matches from her machinations."
David laughed as the major's wife shook her head at him in gentle
reproof, and he asked interestedly:
"When may we come to call, madam? I judge the