“And—­thank you!”

It was as if she had been on the point of saying something else and could not get the form of any sentence except these two words.  Was there anything further to say except “Thank you”?  Anything but to repeat “Thank you”?

There he stood, this stranger so correctly introduced by the Eternal Painter, with his burden, waiting instructions in this moment of awkward diffidence.  He looked at her and at the porch and at his bundle of mail in a quizzical appeal.  Then she realized that, in a peculiar lapse of abstraction, she had forgotten about his encumberment.

Before she could speak there was a sonorous hail from the house; a hail in keeping with the generous bulk of its owner, who had come through the door.  He was well past middle-age, with a thatch of gray hair half covering his high forehead.  In one hand he held the book that he had been reading, and in the other a pair of big tortoise-shell glasses.

“Mary, you are late—­and what have we here?”

He was beaming at Jack as he came across the bridge and he broke into hearty laughter as he viewed Jack’s preoccupation with the second-class matter.

“At last!  At last we have rural free delivery in Little Rivers!  We are the coming town!  And your uniform, sir”—­Jasper Ewold took in the cowboy outfit with a sweeping glance which warmed with the picturesque effect—­“it’s a great improvement on the regulation; fit for free delivery in Little Rivers, where nobody studies to be unconventional in any vanity of mistaking that for originality, but nobody need be conventional.”

He took some of the cargo in his own hands.  With the hearty breeze of his personality he fairly blew Jack onto the porch, where magazines and pamphlets were dropped indiscriminately in a pile on a rattan settee.

“You certainly have enough reading matter,” said Jack.  “And I must be getting on to camp.”

For he had no invitation to stay from Mary and the conventional fact that he had to recognize is that a postman’s call is not a social call.  As he turned to go he faced her coming across the bridge.  An Indian servant, who seemed to have materialized out of the night, had taken charge of her pony.

“To camp!  Never!” said Jasper Ewold.  “Sir Knight, slip your lance in the ring of the castle walls—­but having no lance and this being no castle, well, Sir Knight in chaparejos—­that is to say, Sir Chaps—­let me inform you”—­here Jasper Ewold threw back his shoulders and tossed his mane of hair, his voice sinking to a serious basso profundo—­“yes, inform you, sir, that there is one convention, a local rule, that no stranger crosses this threshold at dinner-time without staying to dinner.”  There was a resonance in his tone, a liveliness to his expression, that was infectious.

“But Firio and Jag Ear and Wrath of God wait for me,” Jack said, entering with real enjoyment into the grandiose style.