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A Girl of Virginia

[Illustration: "He had stepped from his own room far up the corridor."]




A Girl of Virginia

BY

LUCY M. THRUSTON

Author of "Mistress Brent"

_With a Frontispiece by Ch. Grunwald_

Boston
Little, Brown, and Company


_Copyright, 1902_,
BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY.

_All rights reserved_

Printers
S. J. PARKHILL & CO., BOSTON, U. S. A.


_To_

GOVERNOR MONTAGUE, OF VIRGINIA

_A former Student of the University_




A Girl of Virginia




I


"Good morning!" The voice was cheery, insistent. It brought the young
girl on the porch above to the white wooden rail about its edge.

"Good morning!" she called back lightly.

"Beautiful day!" persisted the young man saying inanely the first words
he could think of for the sole purpose of keeping her there in sight.

"Lovely!" cried the girl enthusiastically, leaning a little further over
the rail. A vine, which had climbed the round pillar and twined its
tendrils about the porch's edge, set waving by the slight motion, sent a
shower of scarlet leaves about the young man below; one fluttered upon
his breast, he caught it and held it over his heart as if it were a
message from her to him; and then he fastened it in his button-hole.

The young woman laughed carelessly as he did so; she was too used to
students to exaggerate the meaning of their words or deeds, and there
was no answering flash in her gray eyes as she looked down on him.

"Don't you think it too fine to stay indoors?"

"I'm not in," answered the girl turning her head to look up at the blue
arch of the sky overhead.

"Oh, well"--the young fellow bit his lip, and flushed hotly,--"you know
it's--Come, take a walk across the quadrangle," he added boldly.
"There's no one around."

Frances leaned further for a survey of campus and corridor. "All right!"
she cried, and he could hear her footsteps as she ran down the polished
stair in the big old house. When she opened the great hall door she was
charmingly demure. "Glad to see you Mr. Lawson!" she exclaimed
mischievously to the young man, who stood hat in hand by the wide step.

"Delighted, I'm sure!" he flashed back, holding the hand she extended as
long as he dared,--so long that the young woman had drawn herself up
quite straight and was looking gravely along the corridor when he
released it.

"You haven't mailed your letter!" she said looking at the missive he
still held.

"Oh! and I came--"

"There's the box, don't forget it!"

"Which way are you going?"

"Up to the Rotunda, of course."

"See how it commands everything else," said Frances, pausing at the
sunken, well-worn steps in the terraced corridor to look about her. The
morning shadows of the maples on the quadrangle stretched to the brick
pavement at their feet, scarlet and yellow leaves, blown across the
green grass, rustled about them; the picturesque buildings on the other
side the campus loomed in deep shadowings, for the sun was yet behind
them. A late student slammed his door and went hurrying down the
corridor, his footsteps echoing along the way.

"It is beautiful!" said Frances softly, as she went up the few steps.

"Beautiful, yes, and you don't appreciate it half as much--"

"Appreciate it!"

"Don't you hear the men raving over it everywhere? Those from a good
long distance especially--Oregon, for instance, that's my state you
know; but you Virginians--"

"Are not given to boasting!" said the girl proudly.

"There you are! You are"--"a queer lot," he was about to say, but
remembered himself in time. "You are--" he blundered; "one scarce knows
how to take you."

"Don't take us!" said the girl quietly.

"Now, Miss Holloway," deprecated the young man, "you see, the things
other people think you would be proudest of, you don't care for at all,
and the things other people don't care for--"

"Perhaps there are some people who don't talk about the things they care
for most. Perhaps," she went on, her flushing cheek and darkening eye
belying her light tone, "that's a secret you haven't found out, and it
may be the reason you don't know how to take us," she repeated.

"I'm not going to quarrel about it a morning like this," declared the
young man as they went up the wide steps to the Rotunda and along the
marble floor of the east wing which roofed over the rooms devoted to the
learning of law.

"No, nothing is worth it," answered the girl as she leaned against the
balustrade at the edge and looked off towards the mountains, and they
both were silent.

It was a scene the young man had not yet gotten used to, nor the girl
either, though she was born in its sight. Beyond the stretch of the
outer grounds of the University, beyond the far-reaching roofs and
spires of Charlottesville and the narrow valley of the Rapidan, rose,
high and bold, the last spur of the Ragged Mountains. The blue haze
veiled it even at this early hour; the frost clothing much of it showed
all colors save those of sombre hue; and, set on its crown, just where
it began to dip downwards, shone the whiteness of Monticello.

"He was a great man!" said the young man presently.

The girl nodded. No one ever sat thus, the buildings of the University
stretching at their feet, Monticello gleaming on its mountain crest and
asked the name of the man they lauded.

By and by she asked a question. "For what is Jefferson noted?"

"For being the founder of the democratic--"

"I thought so!" indignantly.

"Indeed! Oh! for founding the University of Virginia."

"You know your lesson quite well," with a little tinge of sarcasm; "if
you stay here long enough you'll find he did a great many other things.
Ah! he knew the beautiful. Look! were there ever any buildings more in
harmony, more exquisite in design, more fitted for living--Pshaw!" she
broke off petulantly at the young man's laugh, "you've made me boast!
You've seen Monticello?" she asked a little haughtily, as she
straightened from her leaning position.

"Of course."

The girl's eyes darkened as she stood looking down the campus from her
point of vantage, and though she was too proud to speak again of its
beauty--for it was her home--the young man's glances followed hers and
he noted it all; the inner quadrangle framed in its buildings of quaint
architecture, the velvet green of the campus, set with maples, and
dipping thrice and then deeply toward the gleaming buildings at the end;
the long stretch of corridors and white pillars, the professors' houses
rising two-storied above the students' homes: and about these, outside,
the wide grounds, the embowering trees, yellow and russet and red; rows
of cottages showing their tops here and there; and far off, rimming it
all, the misty, hazy mountain tops.

"I'm going into the library," announced Frances, all the banter gone
from her voice.

"Have you been to breakfast?" in astonishment.

"Haven't you? Oh! you are lazy! You must go at once. Mrs. Lancey won't
save it for you."

"Yes she will!" He followed her into the fairy white interior of the
Rotunda, with its great pillars bearing above their Corinthian pilasters
the carved circle on which were written the names of the giants of the
book world.

He had some faint desire to see before which of the cases she would
pause. He was proud of his knowledge of his fellow beings, but this
young woman puzzled him. It was a pleasure to his beauty-loving eyes to
gaze on her--tall, slender, but well set up, frank-eyed, clear-skinned
with an air of utter independence; the things he had heard her say and
seen her do kept her from any place in his category.

The long serge gown rustling softly on the marble pavement, she went
straight to the books she wanted. It was late, and she wished to avoid
the stream of students that would soon be setting roomwards and
hallwards.

She took down the volumes instantly--Fiske's "Old Virginia and her
Neighbors," and Byrd's "History of the Dividing Line." If Lawson was
astonished she gave him no chance to express it.

"You must hurry to breakfast," she insisted as they went out.

The young man looked down at the sunlit quadrangle. "Won't you go for a
drive about ten?" he asked abruptly.

"I'm going."

He caught his breath, but before he could answer--

"Susan wants some chickens. I promised her I'd get them. You are not
going out?" severely.

"It's such a temptation!"

"Young men who come all the way from Oregon come to study."

He strove for answer, but the young woman's nod was positive. It sent
him to the mess hall, while she hurried along the corridor, hurried to
avoid the crowd that would soon be abroad. So she had been trained, and
such was second nature. She was not afraid of any student or of all of
them. She had had delightful friends among them. But she was not a
students' belle; her dear father's abhorrence of such had kept her
unscathed.

She lived among them, but the traditions of her household kept her
apart. She was motherless, but her mother's influence had set her feet
in the path of freedom and her father saw to it that they kept their
way. In all the gay students' life that surged about her she was somehow
untouched. She was keenly alive to its phases, to all the life as a
whole, but not to any unit forming it. She saw the belles of the season
come and go at Christmas, at Easter, or the Finals, without the least
desire to outshine them, or shine with them; yet it would have been easy
enough had she wished it. Had she social aspirations she would find many
matrons in the professors' homes to chaperon her; had she been
sentimental she could have made many a bosom friend in the young girls
of the town; had she been trained otherwise, her record from her first
long skirt might have been one of reckless flirtations--for there is no
limit to a student's daring--but as it was, she lived among them quite
simply.

She ordered her father's house; she read, few knew how deeply; she rode,
she drove, and went her own way happily.

One lesson she had at heart. She took the young men about her without an
atom of seriousness. It was this which nettled Frank Lawson.

His attentions had been taken quite seriously usually, too seriously
once, he might have remembered. It aroused his insistence; it sent him
loitering by the gate to the grounds when Frances came driving down the
ribbony road winding outwards.

"I think you might take me," he declared, as she drove slowly by.

"Jump in!" Frances pulled the horse around and left the wheels towards
him hospitably opened.

Lawson thought of the beauty he had driven the afternoon before, of the
roses on her breast for which she had thanked him so graciously, of the
shining skins of his horses and the glittering wheels of his carriage,
and he set his teeth; but he climbed up into the trap and sat down by
Frances' side.

She did not offer him the reins, and he hated being driven by a woman.

"You know most of the roads about here?"

The young man assented.

"Out towards Monticello and down beyond the University and Park Street;
but you don't know this."

Frances had turned towards town, and was driving smartly past
Chancellor's and Anderson's, bookstore and drug store and loitering
grounds of the students, though the porches were empty now, along the
long street, across the high bridge spanning the narrow valley through
which the Southern railroad swept into the town, on down a steep hill;
and then she pulled sharply to the left, down a rough road past <DW64>
cabins, another sharp hill, across a clear mountain stream, and they
were in the country.

"You've never been this way before," repeated Frances as she began to
point out the features of the country. She spoke of house and cabin and
mill; but Lawson's eyes were turned towards the misty mountains. The
keen air blew in his face, the frosty touch sent his pulses tingling:
the smell of green grass and falling leaves and fresh earth was abroad,
and over there, to right to left, swam the mountain-tops in purple
mists. Each hill they topped showed vistas of hill and valley and
far-reaching crest.

The horse went at a good pace; his driver was the most companionable of
drivers; Lawson was absurdly happy.

"What's that little blue flower?" he asked, pointing to a starry bloom,
daisy-shaped, blossoming on a weed-like stem.

"That's another of the beauties for which we thank Jefferson, that and
the Scotch broom in the woods; you saw it?"

"But where does this come from?"

"Don't ask me! Scotland, also, perhaps; here we are!" She pulled up
sharply before a cabin by the road, and, before he could take the reins
she threw down, sprang out.

Lawson sat feeling like a chagrined schoolboy. It was one of the small
accomplishments of which he was proud, to lift a woman from carriage or
saddle. He had strong muscles well trained, and he had a fashion of
putting his hands at the woman's waist and giving her a lift, quick,
light, and sure, and setting her on her feet with a look of pleased
astonishment in her eyes; now he sat holding the reins like any good boy
and watching the flutter of a blue skirt around the clusters of zinnias
and marigolds by the cabin corner. And then he heard voices and laughter
and the squawks of terrified chickens.

Frances was coming back,--a <DW52> woman, with a bunch of chickens in
either hand, walking by her side. He listened to the woman with intense
amusement.

"Why don't you say thanky?" she was demanding.

Frances only laughed.

"I done tole yuh how pretty yuh is; now why don't yuh say thanky?"

"She ought to, that she ought," called Lawson from the trap.

"Hi, honey!" cried the delighted darkey, "is dat him? La, chile, now he
suttenly is a nice beau!"

"Aunt Roxie," said Frances haughtily, "put the chickens in the back of
the trap. You're sure you've got them tied all right?"

"'Co'se I is!"

Lawson, delighted with Frances' discomfiture, was fussing about, helping
the <DW52> woman.

"Jes lissen at her, jes as mighty as you please," she muttered to him,
and then quite loudly, "some folks suttenly is hard to please; yuh
praises dem, dey got nutten to say; yuh praises de beau an' dey looks
mad!"

"Never mind!" cried Frances, "never mind! I'm not going to bring you any
tobacco next time I come!"

"La! Miss Frances, what mattah long yuh now--yuh know--hyar, chile,
lemme pull yuh some dese hyar flowers; de fros' done totch dem anyhow!"

But Frances was not listening; she was off fast as her horse would
trot, the chickens squawking indignantly, and Roxie by her zinnias and
marigolds gazing in open-mouthed astonishment. Lawson was shaking with
laughter. He was even with her he felt, and perhaps a little ahead. He
was sure he was ahead when, just outside the University gate, one of the
chickens, freed after much straining, fluttered under the edge of
Frances' skirt and shrieked a loud and triumphant squawk. Frances sprang
to her feet; but for Lawson she would have been out and under the wheel.
There was no laughter about that young man for one swift instant, when
he threw his arm out, pulled her back into the seat and snatched the
falling reins. The danger past, he caught the offending fowl, fluttering
now in the dash-board, handed it gravely to Frances and then, without a
word of excuse, leaned back and laughed until the tears were in his
eyes.

As for Frances, she was white, she was cold. She had been frightened for
the first time in her life into a silly deed. She was mad through and
through, but it was useless. Under that ringing laugh all else gave
way; she must join in it.

"Never mind," she declared, when Lawson drew rein outside the quadrangle
and lifted her out impressively. "I shall have that chicken for supper."

"I'm coming to help eat him!"

"Come on!" she called gayly, as she disappeared along the walk to the
campus.




II


Frances lingered in the dining-room after dinner was done. She pretended
to be rearranging the flowers on the table; in reality she was thinking
what to say to the little, spare, bent <DW52> woman who was busily
clearing away the dishes.

"Susan," she began, "I think I'll make a cake this afternoon."

"Dyar's half a one hyar now," grumbled Susan with a flash out of her
dark eyes that were like live coals in the wrinkled face.

"And--ah--I thought I'd make some floating island."

"La! chile, what yah gwine pester roun' de kitchen for ter-day?"

Susan had taught Frances the mysteries of cooking and was inordinately
proud of her pupil's skill, but she wanted it practised when it suited
her; and that afternoon had a vision of rest and mending.

"And," went on Frances, to finish now that the subject was broached, "I
got those chickens right out the coop. Roxie says they are nice and fat.
That Dominico now, how would it do to have it smothered?"

Susan wheeled on her. "You's gwine hab company to suppah?"

"Y--e--s!"

"An' yuh wants to hab smothered chicken an' floating island an' cake an'
eberything else I'll ben' my po' back to cook?"

"Your smothered chicken is always so good!" wheedled Frances, who had
managed Susan ever since she could talk.

"Why don' yuh say so den, jes say yuh's gwine hab company to suppah an'
be done wid it."

"Well, we are," laughed Frances, "and I want everything good, like you
always have it."

"Hm!"

But Frances was contented and was gone.

"Wondah who 'tis now?" Susan's eyes, black and still as ink pools in
her yellow, wrinkled face, looked dreamy as they often did when she
thought of Frances. As long as she was blithe and content so was her
faithful care-taker, who had nursed her father when Susan was a child of
ten, and he was a bad infant. She had married and had her own cabin and
her own children when fortune freed her. She had seen her "old man" and
her children die, all of them, there in the cabin in the mountain-side,
except one boy, Bill, and he had gone off to Baltimore; and she had been
glad in her heart when "Marse Robert" and his bright-faced young wife
had driven out to her home back there and asked if she would not come
and live with them. Susan locked her cabin door and looked up and down
the view of misty valley and purple mountains she had looked on for so
many years, and then went with them gladly.

But the cabin she kept. She would rent it to no one, she would not sell
it. It grew weather-beaten and rotten; the sage and mint and bergamot
were choked with weeds. But whatever Susan had lived of her own life
had been lived there. She had been happy, she had been miserable; she
had worked in gladness, she had worked in despair. She had borne
children, she had seen them die, in those four log walls.

The joy, the sorrow of that cabin were hers, and she would keep its
memories. No rude touch of alien life should spoil them. She put the big
key of the door in her pocket and went to be part and parcel of "Marse
Robert's" life; the flame of her devotion to him burned but brighter as
she stood by him when his daughter was laid in his arms,--as she stood
by him, ten years after, when his wife closed her eyes on life and
closed his heart on life's keenest joys.

She had watched his daughter with a delight that knew no limit. Over
most of the <DW64> race beauty holds a potent sway; and had Frances been
less fair, her saucy independence would have been Susan's pride.

"Nebbah see her hangin' 'roun' wid dem stujints," said Susan to herself,
as she finished her work in the dining-room, "Yuh sees 'em dribin'
through hyar sometimes, de young men an' de ladies, and de ladies dey's
fair sickenin' er hangin' on to ebery word; an' long 'bout closin'-up
time"--which was Susan's expression for "Finals"--"den 'tis fair
scanderlous. But Miss Frances--hm--she gib em jes as good as dey sends,
an' she r'ar her haid up in de air, an' I tell yuh now she's got one
pretty haid to r'ar up, sho's yuh born!"

"I's gwine see who's comin' hyar dis ebenin'," she ruminated. "Miss
Frances she don' nebbah 'vite much company nohow; 'tis Marse Robert mos'
always. I's gwine see who dis is, I's gwine watch 'em, sho."

And so she stood in jealous guard over the supper of the professor and
his daughter and their guest. Perhaps it was her watchfulness, her
half-jealous disapproval of Frank Lawson which made things go so badly,
or perhaps the jar began before that when Frances in the professor's
study announced there would be company and she would bring them in there
to spend the evening.

"Why don't you take them in the parlor?" protested the professor.

"It's cold!"

"You can have a fire."

"Yes, but 't would be cold anyhow; the air would feel as if it had been
on storage."

"Daughter!"

"And it would look so proper and prim, there would be no papers lying
around, and I--I should have to talk so hard," she wound up by tucking
her bare arm under the professor's; and he, looking on her winsome face
and soft white neck and shoulders, forgot there was a question and only
smiled at her.

"You, know, father, you needn't talk; you can read--"

"Read!"

"Well," she confided, cuddling close to him, "they do talk such
nonsense, you know, if you've got them off to yourself. I can't stand
it--you needn't laugh!" She rubbed her cheek along the worn broadcloth
of his coat--the professor gave little heed to his clothes-- "You
wouldn't like it either."

The professor's laugh rang through the house, but there was a heartache
under the laughter; his little comrade daughter was a woman grown, and
these questions of womanhood, slight as they were, puzzled him. And so
it was the guest was ushered into the room on the left, instead of the
one on the right, which was properly given over to the gods of company.

The guest gave a start when he saw the shimmer of Frances' white gown
and the gleam of her bare neck and shoulders, and he looked quickly at
her father, but the professor was in ordinary attire. The young stranger
had to learn later that it was merely a local custom, and to wonder
while he learned why the women did not freeze going so clad on a
winter's evening in the wide, high ceilinged, and cold brick houses.

He recovered himself quickly and came forward with jaunty assurance, but
the professor's careless hospitality and the demeanor of his hostess
left little of it when the evening was over. He felt his vaunted ease
ebbing from him and he was amazed that he should so feel it. Even at
the table he was angrily critical. Had it been his mother's board, the
damask and lace had been strewn with flowers, and its tinted shades of
candles shone here and there, and soft shod waiters come and gone, were
a guest bidden to a meal; here the electric light from the single shaded
bulb swinging overhead shone on spotless damask, where it shone at all
between the multitudinous dishes--chicken and ham, rolls and biscuit and
"batter-bread," pickles and preserves, cake, and, with its tremulous
crest of white, floating island shining with a yellow gleam in its glass
dish all before him at one serving.

Still, the young man being healthy and blessed with hunger, and seeing
that his hosts were hungry folk likewise, forgot all comparisons in the
urging of their hospitality, and not only followed their example, but
set the pace. Susan was fairly mollified.

"Knows good vittels when he sees 'em," she muttered in the recess of the
pantry as she eyed his ruddy cheeks and broad shoulders through the
half-opened door.

But, the easy hospitality of the supper over, Lawson's discomfiture
began again. In the morning he would have sworn it was happiness to sit
before the glowing fire which the chill evenings of the mountains
demanded, and to have Frances Holloway so near that one could watch the
color flicker in her clear cheek and catch each tone of her round low
voice and note the curve of white shoulders and dimpled arm.

Instead he felt himself growing steadily angry. Made conversation and an
effort which showed itself at being entertaining and faintly expressed
regrets at an early departure, were not in his line. What he opened his
room door on, was more so.

"Hello, Lawson, waiting for you!"

Three young men had the light oak table drawn up before them. The books
from it were flung on the foot of the narrow white-iron bed: the
table-cover hung on the brass foot-rod.

One of the men leaned back in Lawson's Morris chair, another was seated
a-straddle the only other chair the room contained, his chin resting on
the high back. A third was on the trunk pulled close to the table.

"Room!" he cried, pointing to the vacant half.

"Throw some coal on, Frank, it's chilly. By George, you look cold
yourself."

"Cold! I'm frozen!" Lawson's laugh was not the most pleasant thing to
hear.

"Where have you been? Land alive, look at him!"

"Shut up!" Lawson flung his Prince Albert over the books, crushing the
chrysanthemum he had fastened in his button-hole so carefully earlier in
the evening.

"Game?" he queried.

"I should say so, trot 'em out!" There was a box of cigars on the
mantel. He lit one, the rest were already smoking.

"Helped ourselves, you see!"

"Anything else?"

"Listen to him!"

"That's the stuff, set it here!" The cards were shuffled away for the
bottle and glasses. The window curtains were drawn tightly, the door was
closed and the portière hung in stiff folds across it; the coal snapped
in the grate and the young men settled down for the evening.

But Frances was not winding up her own affairs so nearly to her mind.
The professor had lain down his book as soon as the guest departed.
"Daughter," he began uneasily, "I didn't know you knew Mr. Lawson."

Frances looked at him in astonishment. "Why--how--" she stammered.

"Somehow, he's different from most of the students here," her father
went on, putting his half-framed opinion into words; "he's older and he
looks a man of the world, and he's not over studious," he added a little
sarcastically.

Frances after her first start was listening quietly to his broken
speech.

"These older men," the professor went on, "if they don't come for good
hard work, they--they are the most troublesome kind we have to deal
with. The young fellows, now, they have their faults, but they are the
faults of youth. When these older men graft their knowledge of the world
to their students' folly--well--well--" he was silent for a moment.

Frances, without the slightest wish to defend the absent, sat silent
likewise.

"He's rich too; his father owns immense lumber tracts in Oregon, and his
people live in great style, and--I scarcely know--He's in none of my
classes. But, somehow, he doesn't seem-- I wonder you invited him."

"I didn't."

"Didn't! Why--"

"Oh, daddy, it sort of happened. I'm not anxious to have it happen any
more."

"Well, neither am I, now that I think of it. Going to bed?"

"I'm sleepy as a cat--no! as the Sleeping Beauty!" saucily.

"I believe you always are!" The professor never knew at what hour he
crept to bed, but his daughter's sleepy-headedness was a constant jest.
He never failed to pause at the threshold of her door and listen to the
deep, long breaths of her slumber and to feel warmed to his heart's core
to know she was there, his own daughter, the joy of his life.

"Good night!" She leaned over him, rumpling his dark hair. "Why, there's
the telephone! What can it be so late?" She was hurrying along the hall.

"Hello!"

The father turned to watch with lazy interest the lithe figure and
bright face and bent head, as she stood, red lips pressed together, the
receiver at her ear.

"Ah!" she breathed ecstatically into the 'phone.

"Where did you catch him?"

"To-day!"

"To-morrow!"

"Eight o'clock?"

"Yes, indeed!"

"If father will let me," with one imploring glance fatherward.

"Yes, in a moment, wait!"

"Father, they are going to have a fox-hunt to-morrow--Orange Grove, you
know--meet at eight o'clock. Mr. Payne bought the fox from a <DW52> boy
to-day, he has it out at his house. They are going to turn it loose on
the hill. It's a big red fox, he says." She slipped down on the side of
his chair.

"Great Heavens! You don't want to go?"

Frances never answered, she only held on to him a little tighter.

"Frances, you know, since--"

"Starlight did behave dreadfully that time," she assented.

"Starlight!"

"Suppose I ask Mr. Payne to let me have a mount?"

"Daughter," the father was speaking quite sternly, "you know I told you
I never wanted you to ride behind the hounds again."

There was dead silence. Frances got to her feet and went over to the
mantelpiece, eyes downcast, red mouth down-curved.

"You might drive out to the meet," began her father.

A flash of her eyes answered him.

"I'll order the trap right now!" she said quickly.

"Now, it's late!" began the professor, not liking to be taken so
literally at his word. "I don't think there is any one at the stables."

"Mr. Payne telephoned from there; I told him to wait a moment. I'll try
again."

The professor listened anxiously to the whir and then to the monologue
in the hall.

"Is Mr. Carver there? Yes! So glad!" and then, after a minute's wait,
"Can you send Starlight and the trap up by seven? _Seven?_ Yes! And Mr.
Carver, please see that he is hitched up strongly, will you?"

She hung up the receiver. At the foot of the stairs she paused. "You
don't mind if I drive along the road and follow them a little if I can,
do you?" she asked laughingly.

The professor ran his hand over his perplexed face and picked up his
book; he had no answer. At any rate he felt he had had his say about
young Lawson and so he must not be too severe about this. He little knew
he had given that young man the very clue he needed: for some hour of
that night when the stars grew pale and the gay party in Lawson's room
was breaking up, one of the men vowed he must have an hour's sleep to
steady his nerves for the fox-hunt to-morrow; it was Saturday, and--

"Fox-hunt," cried Lawson.

"Yes; want to go? Meet me at the stables!" and it was