" cried Aunt Verbeny enthusiastically.
"Is you ever see anybody so w'ite en' so' black in de same breff 'cep'n
Miss Meeley? Can't I see her now same ez 'twuz yestiddy, stannin' right
dar in dis yer hall en' sayin', 'You b'longs ter me, Verbeny, en' I'se
gwine ter take cyar you de bes' I kin.'"
Aunt Verbeny fixed her eyes upon the general and he quailed.
"Don't I take care of you, Aunt Verbeny?" he asked appealingly; but
Eugenia, having greeted the remaining servants, drew him with her into
the dining-room. When he sat down at last to the heavily laden table, he
seemed to have grown twenty years younger. As Eugenia hung over him with
domineering devotion, the irritable expression faded from his face and
he grew almost jovial. When she weakened his coffee, he protested
delightedly, and when she refused to allow him his nightly dole of
preserved quinces, he stormed with rapture. "She wants to starve me, the
tyrant," he declared. "She'll take the very bread from my mouth next."
Then his enthusiasm overcame him.
"That's the finest girl in the world, Chris! God bless her, her heart's
as warm as her eyes. Why, she'd damn herself to do a kindness."
Miss Chris appeared to remonstrate.
"I am surprised, Tom," she said disapprovingly, though why she was
surprised or what she was surprised at the general never knew.
When Eugenia went upstairs that night, she blew out her candle and
undressed by the full light of the moon as it shone through the giant
sycamore. Outside, the lawn lay like a sheet unrolled, rent by sharp
black shadows. All the dear, familiar objects were draped by the
darkness as by a curtain; the body of the sycamore assumed a spectral
pallor, and the small rockery near by was as mysterious as a tomb. From
the dusk beneath the window the fragrance of the mimosa tree floated
into the room.
Eugenia, in her long, white nightgown, fell upon her bed and slept.
The next day she went the rounds of the farm. "I'm coming back to take
you for exercise," she remarked to the general as she stood before him
in her sunbonnet.
The general, who was placidly smoking, groaned in protest.
"Then you'll kill me, Eugie," he urged. "Exercise doesn't suit me. I'm
too heavy."
"You'll get lighter," returned Eugenia reassuringly. "You don't move
about half enough, but I'll make you."
The general groaned again, and Miss Chris, pink and fresh in her linen
sacque, came out upon the porch.
"Bless the child!" she excla
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