Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/196

 she leaned toward me with a look of singular vehemence.

"To our murdered brothers and husbands and sons, Mr. Blake! To our lost leaders and our deathless lost cause! To Jefferson Davis and Robert Edmund Lee! To the Confederate States of America!"

A black wind seemed to blow across the face of her servitor's fluttering eyelids. But I drank loyally to Mrs. Caroline Lansdale and whatsoever that woman would. I could see that Clem exhaled a deep breath. How long he had held it I know not.

We resumed our seats, and the dinner went forward with my hostess again herself. It was a dinner not heavy but choice, a repast upon which Clem had magically worked all his spells. There was a bass that had nosed the river's current that morning, two pullets cut off in the very dawn of adolescence, and a mysteriously perfect pastry whose secret I had never been able to wring from him beyond the uninforming and obvious enough data that it contained "some sugah an' a little spicin's."

Having for my luncheon that day suffered an up-to-date dinner at Budds's, I felt a genuine craving for food; yet the spell of my hostess was such that I left her table ahungered.

Again there was an inexplicable reference from her to the timber and sawed-lumber interests of the Little Country, and the circumstance that another black wind seemed to shiver the eyelids of Clem lent