"Sort of a military settlement," smiled Croyden.

"Yes, sir--some of them earned their title in the war, and some of them in the militia and some just inherited it from their pas. Sort of handed down in the family, sir. The men will call on you, promptly, too. I shouldn't wonder some of them will be over this evening."

Croyden thought instantly of the girl he had seen coming out of the Borden place, and who had directed him to Clarendon.

"Would it be safe to speak to the good-looking girls, too--those who are my neighbors?" he asked, with a sly smile.

"Certainly, sir; if you tell them your name--and don't try to flirt with them," Dick added, with a laugh. "Yonder is one, now--Miss Carrington," nodding toward the far side of the street.

Croyden turned.--It was she! the girl of the blue-black hair and slender silken ankles.

"She's Captain Carrington's granddaughter," Dick went on with the Southerner's love for the definite in genealogy. "Her father and mother both died when she was a little tot, sir, and they--that is, the grandparents, sir--raised her. That's the Carrington place she's turning in at. Ah----"

The girl glanced across and, recognizing Dick (and, it must be admitted, her Clarendon inquirer as well), nodded. Both men took off their hats. But Croyden noticed that the older man could teach him much in the way it should be done. He did it shortly, sharply, in the city way; Dick, slowly, deferentially, as though it were an especial privilege to uncover to her.

"Miss Carrington is a beauty!" Croyden exclaimed, looking after her. "Are there more like her, in Hampton?"

"I'm too old, sir, to be a competent judge," returned Dick, "but I should say we have several who trot in the same class. I mean, sir----"

"I understand!" laughed Croyden. "It's no disrespect in a Marylander, I take it, when he compares the ladies with his race-horses."

"It's not, sir! At least, that's the way we of the older generation feel; our ladies and our horses run pretty close together. But that spirit is fast disappearing, sir! The younger ones are becoming--commercialized, if you please. It's dollars first, and _then_ the ladies, with them--and the horses nowhere. Though I don't say it's not wise. Horses and the war have almost broken us, sir. We lost 

 Prev. P 24/216 next