"How old be you, Jake?" she asked.
"I'll be twenty," said I, "the twenty-seventh day of next July."
"We're jest of an age," she ventured--and after a long pause, "I should
think it would be awful hard work to keep the house and do your work
ou'-doors."
I told her that it was, and spread the grief on very thick, thinking all
the time of the very precious way in which I hoped sometime to end my
loneliness, and give myself a house companion: in the very back of my
head even going over the plans I had made for an "upright" to the house,
with a bedroom, a spare room, a dining-room and a sitting-room in it.
"Well," said she, "for a smart, nice-lookin' young man, like you, it's
your own fault--"
5
And then there was a tap on the door. Rowena started, turned toward the
door, made as if to get up to open it, and then sat down again, her face
first flushed and then pale. Her mother opened the door, and there stood
Buckner Gowdy. He came in, with his easy politeness and sat down among
us like an old friend.
"I didn't know you had company," said he; "but I now remember that Mr.
Vandemark is an old friend."
He always called me Mr. Vandemark, because, I guess, I owned seven
hundred and twenty acres of land, and was not all mortgaged up. Virginia
told me afterward, that where they came from people who owned so much
land were the quality, and were treated more respectfully than the
poor whites.
"Yes, sir," said Old Man Fewkes, "Jake is the onliest real old friend
we got hereabouts.
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