But the subject was too fascinating for her morning visitor to abandon. “She probably loved one of them,” she said. “I wonder which it was. I’ll ask the major when I see him. I’m not afraid. He can’t eat me! Wouldn’t it be curious,” she continued, “if it should be somebody who lives here now—whom we’ve always known! I can’t think who it could have been, though. There’s Jenny Quarles—she’s eight years older than we are, if she’s a day—she was a nice little thing, but you couldn’t dream of anybody ever fighting a duel over her. There’s Polly Pendleton, and Berenice Garland—they must have been about the right age, and they never married—but no, it couldn’t have been either of them. The only other spinster I can think of is Miss Mattie Sue, and she was as poor as Job’s turkey and teaching school. Besides, she must have been years and years too old. Hush! There’s Major Bristow at the gate now. And the doctor’s just coming out again.” The major wore a suit of white linen, with a broad-brimmed straw hat, and a pink was in his button-hole, but to the observing, his step might [Pg 135]have seemed to lack an accustomed jauntiness. As he came up the path the doctor opened his office door. Standing on the threshold, his legs wide apart and his hands under his coat-tails, he nodded grimly across the marigolds. “How do you feel this morning, Major.” “Feel?” rumbled the major; “the way any gentleman ought to feel this time of the morning, sah. Like hell, sah.” The doctor bent his gaze on the hilarious blossom in the other’s lapel. “If I were you, Bristow,” he said scathingly, “I reckon I’d quit galivanting around to bridge-fights with perfumery on my handkerchief every evening. It’s a devil of an example to the young.” The rocking-chairs behind the screening vines became motionless, and the ladies exchanged surreptitious smiles. If the two gentlemen were aware of each other’s sterling qualities, their mutual appreciation was in inverse ratio to its expression, and, as the Elucinian mysteries, cloaked before the world. In public the doctor was wont to remark that the major talked like a C sar, looked like a piano-tuner and was the only man he had ever seen who could strut sitting down. Never were his gibes so barbed as when launched against the major’s white-waistcoated and patrician calm, and conversely, never did the major’s bland suavity so nearly approach an undignified irritation as when [Pg 136]receiving the envenomed darts of that accomplished cynic. The major settled his black tie. “A little wholesome exercise wouldn’t be a bad thing for you, Doctor,” he said succinctly. “You’re looking a shade pasty to-day.” “Exercise!” snapped the other viciously, as he pounded down the steps. “Ha, ha! I suppose you exercise—lazying out to the Dandridges once a week for a julep, and the rest of the time wearing out good cane-bottoms and palm-leaf fans and cussing at the heat. You’ll go off with apoplexy one of these days.”