Page:Sheep Limit (1928).pdf/72

 "Spare him the details, Aunt Lila," Edith pleaded, attempting a lightness which it was plain she did not feel.

"He's a tailor, he's got a moustache a foot long—she's got his picture propped up on her dresser."

"Oh, Aunt Lila!"

"Ain't it so? Sure it's so. Never saw him in her life, met him in an advertisement. Mail-order beau, I call him."

Mrs. Duke laughed, either unconscious or careless of the embarrassment her raillery caused the young woman. Rawlins glanced at Edith, trying to express sympathy, and his apology for the unavoidable part he had taken in her discomfiture. She grinned, but it was a costly effort, her face looking worried, even anxious, he thought, out of all proportion to the gravity of the case.

Mrs. Duke must keep her eye on the mixing and dilution of the sheep dip, not entirely convinced of the chemical farmer's ability to do all he claimed. When she discovered him fully experienced in the niceties of the compound she grew quite friendly and confidential, for a sheepman, as she invariably called herself, almost ready, it appeared, to accept him into the fraternity.

When Rawlins applied the sheep-shears, with expedition and success, to the coats of several ewes which had, by reason of their invalid condition at shearing-time, escaped the general denudation, she began to watch him out of the corner of her eye, and to question him shrewdly, sometimes cryptically. She suspected he was more than he represented himself to be, not willing to