Page:Wilson - The Boss of Little Arcady (1905).djvu/248

 "Your intentions were amiable, I concede, but your carelessness was criminal—nothing short of it. You laid the train for a scandal that would have shaken Slocum County to its remotest outlying cornfield, and even made itself felt over this whole sovereign state."

I was gratified to see that she shuddered.

"I shall never learn," she pleaded; "their life is so different."

"Let them at least live it out to its natural end, such as it is," I urged.

Hereupon, confessing herself unnerved, Miss Caroline led me to the dining room, and in a glass of Madeira from a cask forwarded by Second-cousin Colonel Lucius Quintus Peavey, C. S. A., she pledged herself to preserve the decencies as these had been codified in Little Arcady by the Sons and Daughters of Temperance. For my part I drank to her continuance in the wondrous favor of Heaven.

Thereafter, I am bound to say, Miss Caroline conducted herself with a discretion that was admirable. Upon more than one occasion I was made to notice this. One of them was at an evening entertainment at the Eubanks home that autumn, to which it was my privilege to escort her. "A large and brilliant company was present," to quote from a competent authority, and the refreshments were "recherche," to quote again, this being, I believe, the first of our social functions at which Japanese paper napkins were handed around. Eustace Eubanks entertained