At the second sentence the pink parasol became violently agitated.  At the third Helen May was staring at him, mentally if not actually open-mouthed.  At the last she was standing up and reaching for her mail, and she had not yet decided in her mind whether he was joking or whether he expected to be taken seriously.  Even when he laughed, with that odd, dancing light in his eyes, she could not be sure.  But because his voice was warm with human sympathy and the cordiality of a man who is very sure of himself and can afford to be cordial, she smiled back at him.

“That’s awfully good of you, Mr. Sommers,” she said, shuffling her handful of letters eagerly to see who had written them; more particularly to see if Chum’s brother had written one of them.  “I hope you didn’t drive out of your way to bring them” (there was one; a big, fat one that had taken two stamps!  And one from Chum herself, and—­but she went back gloatingly to the thick, heavy envelope with the bold, black handwriting that needed the whole face of the envelope for her name and address), “because I know that miles are awfully long in this country.”

“Yes?  You have discovered that incontrovertible fact, have you?  Then I hope you will permit me to drive you home, especially since these packages are much too numerous and too weighty for you to carry in your arms.  As a matter of fact, I have been hoping for an opportunity to meet our new neighbors.  Neighbors are precious in our sight, I assure you, Miss Stevenson, and only the misfortune of illness in the household has prevented my sister from looking you up long ago.  How long have you been here?  Three weeks, or four?” His tone added:  “You poor child,” or something equally sympathetic, and he smiled while he cramped the old buggy so that she could get into it without rubbing her skirt against the dustladen wheel.

Helen May certainly had never seen any one just like Holman Sommers, though she had met hundreds of men in a business way.  She had met men who ran to polysyllables and pompousness, but she had never known the polysyllables to accompany so simple a manner.  She had seen men slouching around in old straw hats-and shoddy gray trousers and negligee shirts with the tie askew, and the clothes had spelled poverty or shiftlessness.  Whereas they made Holman Sommers look like a great man indulging himself in the luxury of old clothes on a holiday.

He seemed absolutely unconscious that he and his rattly buggy and the harness on the horse were all very shabby, and that the horse was fat and pudgy and scrawny of mane; and for that she admired him.

Before they reached the low adobe cabin, she felt that she was much better acquainted with Holman Sommers than with Starr, whose name she still did not know, although he had stayed an hour talking to Vic and praising her cooking the night before.  She did not, for all the time she had spent with him, know anything definite about Starr, whereas she presently knew a great deal about Holman Sommers, and approved of all she knew.