“You can just stake your life I mean it, son,” said he.
“But will Annie Laurie—will the aunts let me?”
The reverend Mr. Summers nodded his long, thin head.
“I’ll tell ’em to,” he said. “Mr. Carson will advise ’em too. You’ll be making reparation, Samuel. You’ll be squaring yourself and your family. You’ll get back what belongs to you, the respect of the community, the regard of your—particular friends. And you’ll live here, in my house, understand?”
“I say you’ll live here,” roared the tall preacher. “Do you think I’d let you go back to that forsaken house and sit there with all the sneaking ghosts of memory putting their miserable noses in the doors and windows o’ nights, making goblin faces at you? Not much. Barbara! Barbara, I say!”
Mrs. Barbara came running on her little feet.
“Absalom,” she whispered excitedly, “what’s the use in waking the baby? Don’t you know any better than that?”
“Willow waly,” he gasped. “Can’t I ever remember about that young-un? But, Barbara, I suppose you have been listening to our conversation?”
“I have been sitting in the next room,” replied little Mrs. Summers with dignity. “It would have been impossible for me to avoid hearing parts of it.”
“Well, then, what do you think? Is this boy going back to that shut-up house of his, or is he going to stay here at the parsonage? That’s what I want to know.”
“What’s the use of asking such a silly question as that?” she inquired. “Of course he’s going to stay here. I was just thinking I’d run up that rosebud muslin into curtains for his room.”
The Reverend Summers turned a radiant smile on Sam.
“That’s the woman for you!” he cried. “You think you can get ahead of her, but you can’t! You’d have to be smarter than a possum to get ahead of her. Rosebud curtains! Now, what do you think of that, Sam? Could you have got as far as rosebud curtains in that length of time?”
He caught his little wife up in his great arms and tossed her toward the ceiling as if she had been a baby. Then he kissed her so loud that the smack must have been heard in the street, and dropped her in his sleepy hollow chair.
“Where’s my hat?” he demanded. “My nice, six-year-old Panama—the Panama of many journeys, of my courtship, of my marriage, and probably of my old age? Why, Sam, you ought to count the rings on that hat. It’s more’n a hundred, I reckon—if you judge it like you do oaks. Come, sneak out the back way so as not to shake the royal bed of the slumbering potentate. Where are we going? To talk with Miss Adnah Pace. Yes, I know she’s rather a difficult one to manage. But I can manage her. That’s my specialty, managing women.”