The Desired Woman | Page 7

fine lips were twitching. "I'd
not be a natural woman if I didn't appreciate his--his honest
admiration."
"Honest nothing!" Mitchell blurted out. "He thinks you are going to
have money, and he believes you'll be silly enough to be influenced by
his puppy love to make a fool of yourself. Besides, he's in the way. He
took you to a dance not long ago when Mostyn wanted to go with you.
Dick told me at the bank that he was going to invite you, and then that
young blockhead called for you."
Miss Mitchell had the air of one subduing interest. She forced a faint
smile into the general gravity of her face. "Andy had asked me a month
before," she said, "or, rather, his mother asked me for him the day the
cards were sent out."
"I knew she had a hand in it," Mitchell retorted, in a tone of conviction.

"That old woman is the most cold-blooded matchmaker in the State,
and she's playing with you like a cat with a mouse. They want my
money, I tell you--that's what they are after. I know how the old thing
talks to you--she's always telling you her darling boy is dying of grief,
and all that foolishness."
Irene avoided her father's eyes. She wound a thick wisp of her hair
around her head and began to fasten it with a hairpin. He heard her sigh.
Then she looked straight at him.
"You are bothering entirely too much," she half faltered, in a tone that
was all but wistful. "Now, I'll make you a promise if--if you'll make me
one. You are afraid Dick Mostyn and I will never come to--to an
understanding, but it is all right. I know I must be sensible, and I intend
to be. I'm more practical than I look. Now, here is what I am going to
propose. Andy Buckton may be at Atlantic City with his mother, and I
want you to treat them decently. If you will be nice to them I will
assure you that when Dick gets back from the mountains he will
propose and I will accept him."
"You talk as if you knew positively that he--"
"I understand him," the young lady said. "I know him even better than
you do, with all your business dealings together. Now, that will have to
satisfy you, and you've got to let me see Andy up there. You simply
must."
"Well, I don't care," the old man said, with a breath of relief. "This is
the first time you ever have talked any sort of sense on the subject."
"I know nothing else will suit you," Irene said, with a look of
abstraction in her eyes, "and I have made up my mind to let you have
your way."
There was a tremulous movement to her breast, a quaver in her voice,
of which she seemed slightly ashamed, for she turned suddenly and left
the room.

CHAPTER III

At the gate in front of his farmhouse in the mountains Tom Drake
received a letter from the rural mail-carrier, who was passing in a
one-horse buggy.
"That's all this morning, Tom," the carrier said, cheerfully. "You've got
good corn and cotton in the bottom below here."
"Purty good, I reckon, if the drouth don't kill 'em," the farmer answered.
The carrier drove on, and Tom slowly opened his letter and turned
toward the house. He was a typical Georgia mountaineer, strong, tall,
broad-shouldered, middle-aged. He wore no beard, had mild brown
eyes, heavy chestnut hair upon which rested a shapeless wool hat full of
holes. His arms and legs were long, his gait slouching and deliberate.
He was in his shirt-sleeves; his patched jean trousers were too large at
the waist, and were supported by a single home- knitted suspender. He
was chewing tobacco, and as he went along he moved his stained lips
in the audible pronunciation of the words he was reading.
His wife, Lucy, a slender woman, in a drab print dress with no sort of
adornment to it or to her scant, tightly knotted hair, stood on the porch
impatiently waiting for him. Behind her, leaning in the doorway, was
her brother, John Webb, a red-haired, red-faced bachelor, fifty years of
age, who also had his eyes on the approaching reader.
"Another dun, I reckon," Mrs. Drake said, tentatively, when her
husband had paused at the bottom step and glanced up from the sheet in
his hand.
"Not this time." Tom slowly spat on the ground, and looked first at his
wife and then at his brother-in-law with a broadening smile. "You two
are as good at guessin' as the general run, but if I gave you a hundred
trials--yes, three hundred--and all day to do it in, you