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Samuel Sleeny, a carpenter who worked with her father, and who took his meals with the family, had fallen in love with her at first sight, and, after a year of dumb hopelessness, had been so encouraged by her father's evident regard that he had opened his heart to Saul and had asked his mediation. Matchin undertook the task with pleasure.
"It's in all of us, Saul," said Mrs. Matchin, trying to improve the occasion for the edification of her unbelieving husband. Maud had felt mingled with her sorrow a suspicion of remorse. She could not help remembering that Sam considered Farnham his rival, with how little reason she knew better than any one.
He made several notes and picked up some trifling articles, for which he gave Mr. Matchin receipts. Corning out of the room, he looked carefully at the door-knob. "Seems all right," he said. Then turning to Matchin, he said, with professional severity, "What door did he generally come in by?"
He hed a heap o' notions about things matchin'. He brought me that gownd the v'yage he made jest afore Caleb was born; and I never hed a chance to wear it much, the children come so fast. It warn't re'ly worn at all, 'n' I hed it dyed black for veils arterwards."
When they had all, however, exhausted their limited store of reflections, a thing took place which increased the horror and the certainty of Mr. and Mrs. Matchin, and left Maud a prey to a keener doubt and anxiety than ever. Late in the afternoon a sharp-faced man, with a bright eye and a red mustache, came to the house and demanded in the name of the law to be shown Sam's bedroom.
There were several reasons why Offitt stayed longer than Bott. The seer had left Maud Matchin in a state of high excitement and anger. The admiration of a man so splay and ungainly was in itself insulting, when it became so enterprising as to propose marriage. She felt as if she had suffered the physical contact of something not clean or wholesome.
She made herself so disagreeable about it that she ceased to be invited to those lively entertainments; and some of the most eligible of the young "Cariboos" a social order of a secret and mysterious rite, which met once a week in convenient woodsheds and stable-lofts took an oath with hands solemnly clasped in the intricate grip of the order, that "they would never ask Miss Matchin to go to party, picnic, or sleigh-ride, as long as the stars gemmed the blue vault of heaven," from which it may be seen that the finer sentiments of humanity were not unknown to the Cariboos.
They went against three permanently fortified places, the antediluvian little Matchin which if I remember right blew itself up; the crumbling Nicopolis which surrendered after one day's fighting; and Rustchuk which held out till the end of the war.
The fingers were long and white, and the nails were shaped like an almond, and though the hands lacked delicacy at the articulations, they almost made Matchin reverence his daughter as his superior, as he looked at his own. One evening, irritated by the silence and his own thoughts, he cried out with a sudden suspicion: "Where do you git all them books, and what do they cost?"
Her dress wuz thin and white and gauzy, and though it wuz considerable plain it wuz made beautiful by the big bunch of pale pink roses at her belt and bosom, jest matchin' her cheeks in color. I wuz proud of her. And I felt quite well about my other companion, for as I glanced at the small kerseymear figger and pert bald head, I sez to myself, "He makes a much better escort than none at all."
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