"If there is, my dear boy, I'm not going to tell it," she answered with
a calmness which he felt, in his excited state, to be positively
infernal. "All I meant was to warn you not to trifle with any girl as
innocent of life as Jinny Pendleton is. I don't want her to get her
heart broken before she has the chance to make some man happy."

"Do you honestly mean to imply that I could break her heart if I tried
to?"

"I don't mean to imply anything. I am only telling you that she is just
the kind of girl a man would want to marry. She is her mother all over
again, and I don't believe Lucy has ever thought of herself a minute
since she married."

"She looks like an angel," he said, "but----"

"And she isn't a bit the kind of girl that Susan is, though they are so
devoted. Now, I can understand a man not wanting to marry Susan,
because she is so full of ideas, and has a mind of her own about
things. But Jinny is different."

Then, seeing that she had "unsettled" his mind sufficiently for her
purpose, she rose and looked around the room with the inordinate
curiosity about details which kept her still young in spite of her sixty
years.

"You don't mean to tell me you brought all those books with you,
Oliver?" she asked. "Why on earth don't you get rid of some of them?"

"I can't spare any of them. I never know which one I may want next."

"What are those you're putting on the mantelpiece? Isn't Darwin the name
of the man who said we were all descended from monkeys?"

As he made no answer to this except to press her hand and thank her for
coming, she left the mantelpiece and wandered to the window, where her
gaze rested, with a look of maternal satisfaction, on the roofs of
Dinwiddie.

"It's a jolly view of the town, isn't it?" he said. "There's nothing
like looking down from a hilltop to give one a sense of superiority."

"You can see straight into Mrs. Goode's backyard," she replied, "and I
never knew before that she left her clothes hanging on the line on
Sunday. That comes, I suppose, from not looking after her servants and
gadding about on all sorts of charities. She told me the other day that
she belonged to every charitable organization in Dinwiddie."

"Is she Abby's mother?"

"Yes, but you'd never imagine they were any relation. Abby gave me more
trouble than any girl I ever taught. She never would learn the
multiplication table, and I don't believe to this day she knows it.
There isn't any harm in he