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The manifest evasion and mute declaration that dumpling said "mum" on that head, gave the farmer a quiet glow. "When you are ready to tell me all about my darlin', sir," Mrs. Sumfit suggested, coaxingly. "After dinner, mother after dinner," said the farmer. "And we're waitin', are we, till them dumplings is finished?" she exclaimed, piteously, with a glance at Master Gammon's plate.
Greenacre is eccentric, but thoroughly trustworthy. He had a gentleman's education." "He lives there, does he?" exclaimed Gammon. "Finds it convenient, I suppose. Yes, we will go and inquire we certainly will." Gammon's objections were unheeded. No one could take any harm, said Lord Polperro, from driving in a closed cab to the City and back.
Gammon's entrance into the office of the first selectman of Smyrna was unobtrusive. In fact, to employ a paradox, it was so unobtrusive as to be almost spectacular. The door opened just about wide enough to admit a cat, were that cat sufficiently slab-sided, and Mr. Gammon slid his lath-like form in edgewise. He stood beside the door after he had shut it softly behind him.
Clover was no whit easier in mind; but both had become silent. Merely saying that she would see her hostess again before long, the lady of the china shop took a hurried leave and quitted the house. She had walked but a few yards when Mr. Gammon's voice sounded at her shoulder. "I'll see you part of the way home," he said genially. "I'm much obliged to you, Mr. Gammon," was Mrs.
He watched it for some time from the other side of the way until the ladies came forth again. It would have soothed Gammon's mind could he have known that they were Lord Polperro's sister and his niece. In the meantime he had seen Polly Sparkes, informed her of what was happening, and received her promise that she would take no step until he could communicate with her again.
Sumfit confided the termination of her story to Rhoda; or suggested rather, at what distant point it might end; and then, giving Master Gammon's box to her custody, with directions for Dahlia to take the boxes to a carpenter's shop not attempting the power of pokers upon them and count and make a mental note of the amount of the rival hoards, she sent Dahlia all her messages of smirking reproof, and delighted love, and hoped that they would soon meet and know happiness.
This unusual display of public somnolence on Master Gammon's part, together with the veteran's reputation for slowness, made the farmer fret at him as being in some way an obstruction to the lively progress of the hours.
You 'm not going to push me out? And my place is by the tea-pot, which I cling to, rememberin' how I seen her curly head grow by inches up above the table and the cups. Mas' Gammon," she appealed to the sturdy feeder, "five cups is your number?" Her hope was reduced to the prolonging of the service of tea, with Master Gammon's kind assistance.
Gammon's homestead to be a gray and unkempt farm-house from which the weather had scrubbed the paint. The front yard was bare of every vestige of grass and contained a clutter that seemed to embrace everything namable, including a gravestone. "What be ye gettin' ready for an auction?" growled the Cap'n, groutily, his seaman's sense of tidiness offended.
"I've got used to it, and it'll keep me out of mischief." Her merry little laugh echoed in Gammon's ears all the way home, and for hours after. And when, as he rose next morning, he looked out on to the strips of back-yard and the towering tenements, they had lost all their ugliness.
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