"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.