“I guess you’ll think I’m goin’ ’round Robin Hood’s barn to git to it. Mr. Dalton worshipped his wife, and she ’peared to worship him, till there come up from Boston a dark complected man, a friend of the Dalton’s,—St. John, they called him, and he was there half the time talkin’ to Miss Dalton and playin’ the flute while she banged the pianner. The rest of the time he sat on the piazza at the tavern smokin’, takin’ drinks oftener than Mr. Dalton, but never treatin’ nobody. Mr. Dalton thought a sight of him. They was college chums,—Harvard, I b’lieve,—and when he went off on the stage he’d ask him to sleep in his house and see to Miss Dalton, who was timid,—the more fool he. And he did see to Miss Dalton, and drove with her and walked with her clear up to North Ridgefield, and didn’t get back till after dark. Folks began to talk and the women pumped Mari, who wouldn’t say nothin’, she was so bound up in Miss Dalton. “After a spell another feller appeared, St. John’s vally they called him, and he brushed his clothes and blacked his boots, and walked behind him in the street, and went a good deal to the Dalton’s,—sparkin’ Mari, folks said, and I guess that was so. Wall, after a spell another chap appeared,—brother to the vally, they pretended. He didn’t go to the Dalton’s, but sat on the piazza and smoked and drank and swore about big bugs ridin’ over the poor, and was an ugly lookin’ cuss generally. Mr. Dalton was real good to him,—gave him money once or twice and tried to git him work. But he didn’t want to work. It warn’t that he’d come for. “Wall, as I was sayin’, things went on this way with St. John and his vally and his vally’s brother comin’ and goin’, till folks was talkin’ pretty loud and sayin’ Dalton or’to be told, and finally Dot’s ancestor,—the one who kep’ the tavern,—up and told Mr. Dalton careful like what folks was surmisin’, and hinted that St. John shouldn’t go there so much. Mr. Dalton threw back his head and laughed the way Mark has when he don’t believe a thing. “St. John was his best friend; he’d known him since he was a boy, he said, and his wife was a second pen—penny—something——” “Penelope,” Craig suggested.