"Well, you may not, dear, but George and I do," she rejoined, pinning the white stuff on a clothes-line she had stretched between the door and the window, "we are both interested, you see, in getting you back to work. There's the door-bell, George. You may wash your hands at the sink and answer it. If it's the butter, bring it to me, and if it's a caller, let him wait, while I turn down my sleeves." Rising from his knees, George washed his hands at the sink, and went out along the brick walk to the house, while I stood in the doorway, under the shadow of the pink crape myrtle, and made a vow in my heart. "Sally," I said at last in the agony of desperation, "you ought to have married George." With her arms still upraised to the clothes-line, she looked round at me over her shoulder. "He is useful in an emergency," she admitted; "but, after all, the emergency isn't the man, you know." I was about to press the point home to conscience, when George, returning along the walk, announced with the mock solemnity of a footman in livery, that the callers were Dr. Theophilus and the General, who awaited us in the sitting-room. "There's no hurry, Sally," he added; "they started over to condole with you, I imagine, but they've both become so absorbed in discussing this neighbourhood as it was fifty years ago, that I honestly believe they've entirely forgotten that you live here." "Well, we'll have to remind them," said Sally, with a laugh; and when she had rolled down her sleeves and tidied her hair before the cracked mirror on the wall, we went back to the house, where we found the two old men engaged in a violent controversy over the departed inhabitants of Church Hill. "I tell you, Theophilus, it wasn't Robert Carrington, but his brother Bushrod that lived in that house!" exclaimed the General, as we entered; and he concluded--while he shook hands with us, in the tone of one who forever clinches an argument, "I can take you this minute straight over there to his grave in Saint John's Churchyard. How are you, Ben, glad to see you up," he observed in an absent-minded manner. "Have you got a palm-leaf fan around, Sally? I can't get through these sweltering afternoons without a fan. What do you think Theophilus is arguing about now? He is trying to prove to me that it was Robert Carrington, not Bushrod, who lived in that big house at the top of the hill. Why, I tell you I knew Bushrod Carrington as well as I did my own brother, sir." He sat far back in his chair, pursing his full red lips angrily, like a whimpering child, and fanning himself with short, excited movements of the palm-leaf fan. His determined, mottled face was covered thickly with fine drops of perspiration.