It is wonderful how little mental capital a man need possess to deceive the cleverest wife. Tubal Cain Sims, seated in the open passage, tilted far back against the wall in his chair, his saddle on the floor beneath his dangling feet and his mare cropping the grass beside the step, sustained every appropriate pose of surprised interest as successfully as if Mrs. Sims’s story were new to his ears. How could she, even if infinitely more astute, have dreamed that it was the recital of these same facts which he had overheard that had sent him straight to Colbury with the instant determination to have his would-be son-in-law incarcerated on a criminal charge, before more romance could come of the juggler’s stay in Etowah Cove? She had expected opposition, having divined Tubal Sims’s disapproval of his guest from his perturbed and unwontedly crusty manner, and was scarcely prepared for the mildly temporizing way in which he received the disclosure. “Humph--a--waal, we-uns will hev ter gin it cornsideration, Jane Ann, a power o’ cornsideration, an’”--he suddenly remembered his piety--“some pray’r. Watch an’ pray, Jane Ann.” “I’m ekal ter my prayin’ ’thout yer exhortin’s,” she retorted, with proper spirit. “An’ ef ye don’t wan ter set Phemie agin ye, ye’d better do yer own prayin’ powerful private.” She could not forbear this gibe, albeit at the idol of them both. It was in graver and agitated mood that she revealed how the idea of an elopement had seemed to appeal to the young man’s mind,--so much, indeed, that she began to fear he would welcome any parental opposition which would make it practicable. And here she found Tubal Cain at one with her own thoughts, so a-quiver with her own fears that she felt all at once bolder, as if by communicating them they had mysteriously exhaled. Not so Tubal Cain Sims. It is to be doubted whether in all his life he was ever so earnestly and markedly benign and courteous as when he again met the juggler. His whole manner was so charged with the sentiment of placation that the young man’s quick discernment easily divined his state of mind and his covert terrors. It eliminated for the present any other course of action than drifting along the smooth tides of love’s young dream, for no elopement was possible when there was naught from which to flee.