"
"I guess I'd ruther come in alone!" I said.
"You mustn't be uncharitable," said she. "Mr. Gowdy is still hopeful of
getting that property for Virginia Royall. He is working on that all the
time. He came to get her signature to a paper this week. He is a changed
man, Jacob--a changed man."
I can't tell how thunderstruck I was by this bit of news. Somehow, I
could not see Buck Gowdy as a member of the congregation of the
saints--I had seen too much of him lately: and yet, I could not now
remember any of the old hardness he had shown in every action back along
the Ridge Road in 1855. But Virginia must have changed toward him, or
she would not have allowed him to approach her with any kind of paper,
not even a patent of nobility.
But I rallied from my daze and took Grandma Thorndyke to see my live
stock--birds and beasts. I discovered that she had been a farmer's
daughter in New England, and I began to suspect that it relieved her to
drop into New England farm talk, like "I snum!" and "Hooraw's nest." I
never saw a hooraw's nest, but she seemed to think it a very
disorderly place.
"This ain't the last time, Jacob," said she, as she climbed into Jim
Boyd's buggy that Henderson L. had borrowed. "You may expect to find
your house red up any time when I can get a ride out."
I was in a daze for some time trying to study out developments. Buck
Gowdy and Mrs. Mobley; Rowena and Magnus Thorkelson; Gowdy's calls on
Rowena, or at least at her home; Rowena's going to live in his house as
a hired girl; her warmth to me; her nervousness, or fright, at Gowdy;
Gowdy's religious tendency in the midst of his entanglements with the
fair sex; his seeming reconciliation with Virginia; his pulling of the
wool over the eyes of Mrs.
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