me to sit down and told me what he enjoyed telling very much.




CHAPTER XIV

"Everybody has been talking about the way Whythe Eppes has been rushing
you," he began, fanning as hard as he could fan, "and several people
have been to see Miss Susanna and told her they thought your parents
ought to know--"

He didn't get any further. I stopped him. It was silly in me to get
hot, but I got hot all right, and in all my life I never wanted anybody
as I wanted Billy right then at my side. He doesn't get mad the way I
do. He would see that talk he did not like was stopped in two minutes,
but I was too fighting angry to stop my own tongue, and I said things
to fat Miss Nancy Willie Prince I oughtn't to have said. Among them
that my parents would not have permitted me to come to this town or any
other if not perfectly certain I knew how to behave myself wherever I
went, and that whatever was advisable for them to know concerning me
they would know without the assistance of Miss Bettie Simcoe or Mrs.
Caperton (she is a frisky little widow who has no use for young girls)
or any other Twickenham-Towner. And then, perhaps because he was so
flustered he didn't know what he was saying, he told me riches were a
great temptation to any young man, and everybody, of course, knew my
father was wealthy, though he must say it had not been learned from the
family. And that Whythe, being poor from a money standpoint, had
naturally been tempted, especially as his engagement had been so
recently broken with a girl he had been in love with since childhood,