“Hey? Oh, yes, Loomis was awful pleased with her at first, but she didn’t seem to take much of a fancy to him. Kinder laughed at him. Loomis is sort o’ fussy. Anyway, she made him mad one day, and from that on he didn’t give me any peace.” Mrs. Pogram sniffed again and gave her lachrymose package another shake so that its tears bedewed the walk as if she were weeping vicariously. “He made you send the girl away?” asked Irving quickly, a line coming in his forehead at the remembrance of the mincing young clerk who had been the natural victim of many a prank of his own boyhood. [41] [41] “Not made me, exactly,” returned Mrs. Pogram, “but Rosalie got so she wouldn’t stand it any longer. You see,” her complaining tone altering to one of some complacence, “though I ain’t any millionairess, my estate ain’t exactly to be sneezed at. The old Pogram mahogany and the silver that was my mother’s are worth considerable; and Loomis was on pins for fear I’d give some of ’em to Rosalie. I give her a spoon once—it was real thin, Irvin’, not worth much of anything in money, but it was a time when Rosalie’d taken care of me through a fever and I felt to give her somethin’; and law, from the way Loomis took on you’d ’a’ thought I’d made him a poor man for the rest of his life. Honestly I was ashamed of him; and I kep’ his actions away from Rosalie as much as I could; but she’s smart, and she saw she’d gained Loomis’s enmity by laughin’ at him, and saw that he was gettin’ kinder jealous of her about the things; and if she would only have been quiet, and spoken him fair, and we both kept our own counsel, I could have slipped many a little thing to her and he’d never ’a’ known the difference. Things weren’t ever the same after your mother gave her that winter at[42] Lambeth. She never laughed at Loomis till after that, and then came my sickness and I gave her the spoon, and from that time there wa’n’t ever any peace.” [42] The line in Irving’s forehead came again. “Then you don’t think Mrs. Bruce’s gift to Rosalie was an advantage.” “Well, I was willin’ to spare her for her own good, for I could see what her longings were, and felt I hadn’t ought to stand in her way. Loomis favored it because I think ’twas his idea then that he and Rosalie would both come into the Brown-Pogram estate one o’ these days.” Irving lifted a hand to conceal some ebullition which escaped him at
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