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The weather was fine, the roses were out, the very best people were there, the bazaar was profitable, and the dowager of the Hollister matrons had spoken warm words of admiration of the competent way in which the occasion had been managed to Mrs. Emery, smiling and flushed in an indomitably self-respecting pleasure.
Their eyes met, and they walked together for a few minutes in close conversation, when Dunwoodie returned, and dismissed the guard to their place of rendezvous. Sergeant Hollister, however, continued along with Betty, who, having found none of her vestments disturbed but such as the guinea more than paid for, was in high good humor.
"A log house with two rooms, where some shingle-bolts had been cut with a bolt-chute leading downhill?" "The very same," Hollister continued. "I see you know the place. "My poor books," she murmured. "I thought the rats had torn them to bits long ago." "No. Except for a few nibbles at the binding.
People stared at the handsome couple and at their beaming faces. Joy was stamped on their countenances and happiness shone from their eyes. When they arrived home, Tom walked up to Mrs. Hollister, and kissing her he said: "I have asked Ethel to be my wife. Will you and Mr. Hollister give her to me?" Mrs. Hollister gasped. "Why Tom! Ethel! Is it true?" Ethel put her arm around her mother.
That'll do him a l-lot of good give him confidence." Hollister stared. His face broke slowly to a grin. "I got to give it to you, Blister. I'll bet there ain't any more like you at home. Let him lick me, eh? So's to give him confidence. Wallop me good an' plenty, you said, didn't you? By gum, you sure enough take the cake." "Won't hurt you any. You've give an' took plenty of 'em. Think of him."
Hollister, this is the first time Lydia's been out with our crowd since she came home!" "You might let her alone!" "Go away, Paul, you greedy thing!" "I haven't asked Lydia a single thing about her European trip!" "Well, maybe you think," he cried, springing out to the sidewalk, "that I've been spending the last year traveling around Europe with Lydia! I haven't heard any more than you have."
And in return he, as they did, levied upon nature's store of raw material and paid for what he got with timber, rough shaped to its ultimate uses by the labor of his hands. All his life Hollister had been able to command money without effort. Until he came back from the war he did not know what it meant to be poor. He had known business as a process in which a man used money to make more money.
Her blue eyes rested on him, searchingly, he thought, with a curious appraisal, as if he were something to be noted and weighed and measured by the yardstick of her estimation of men. If she only knew, Hollister reflected sardonically, with his face buried in the towel, what a complete and intimate knowledge she had of him!
Tom and Susan Peters flit across the view, and Gene Hollister and Perry Blackwood and the Ewanses, all of whom had come up in a special car; Ralph Hambleton was "best man," looking preternaturally tall in his frock-coat: and his manner, throughout the whole proceeding, was one of good-natured tolerance toward a folly none but he might escape.
Hollister went to bed, but not to sleep. He heard a great clock somewhere in the town strike twelve and then one, while he still lay staring up at the dusky ceiling. But his thoughts had taken a pleasanter road. He had turned over the pages of his life history, scanned them with a gloomy and critical eye, and cast them with decisive finality into the waste basket.
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