Page:Caroline Lockhart--The Fighting Shepherdess.djvu/137

 he endeavored to recall what It was in particular that he had saved to tell him. Oh, yes!

"What do you think I heard today, Abram?"

Abram was figuring interest and murmured absently:

"I have no idea."

"They say," in her sprightliest manner, "that that girl who killed her lover was refused credit at every store a Prouty. No one would trust her for even five dollars' worth of groceries. Rather pathetic, isn't it?"

Mr. Pantin looked up quickly. "Who told you that?"

"Everyone seems to know it."

Mr. Pantin frowned slightly.

"If you mean Miss Prentice, I wouldn't speak of her in that fashion, Priscilla."

"Mormon Joe's Kate, then, if you like that better," replied Mrs. Pantin, nettled. "Or 'Mormon Joe's Kate,' either," curtly. "So sorry; I didn't know you knew her. Do you?"

Mr. Pantin, who at his own table was given the privilege of taking bones in his fingers, pointed the chop at her. "Let me tell you something, Priscilla," impressively. "Someone who is cleverer than I am has said that it is never safe to snub a pretty girl, because there is always the possibility that she'll marry well and be able to retaliate. The same thing applies to one who has brains and is in earnest. I've made it a rule never to disparage the efforts of a person who had a definite purpose and works to attain it. It's about a fifty-to-one shot that he'll land—sometime."

Mrs. Pantin looked at her husband suspiciously. There were times when she had a notion that she had not explored the furthermost recesses of his nature—when