“You’ll have to live some place where there is a man,” she continued, with worried conviction.

My time had come, and the fight was on.  Oh, Jane!

“I don’t believe I really feel that way about it,” I began in the gentlest of manners, and slowly, so as to feel my way.  “You see, Sallie dear, and dearest Cousin Martha, I have had to be out in the world so much—­alone, that I am—­used to it.  I—­I haven’t had a man’s protection for so long that I don’t need it, as I would if I were like you two blessed sheltered women.”

“I know it has been hard, dear,” said Cousin Martha gently looking her sympathy at my lorn state, over her glasses.

“I don’t see how you have stood it at all,” said Sallie, about to dissolve in tears.  “The love and protection and sympathy of a man are the only things in life worth anything to a woman.  Since my loss I don’t know what I would have done without Cousin James.  You must come into his kind care, Evelina.”

“I must learn to endure loneliness,” I answered sadly, about to begin to gulp from force of example, and the pressure of long hereditary influence.

I’m glad that I did not dissolve, however, before what followed happened, for in the twinkling of two bare feet I was smothered in the embrace of Henrietta, who in her rush brought either the Pup or the Kit, I can’t tell which yet, along to help her enfold me.

“I’ll come stay with you forever, and we don’t need no men!  Don’t like ’em no-how!” she was exclaiming down my back, when a drawl from the doorway made us all turn in that direction.

“Why, Henrietta, my own, can it be you who utter such cruel sentiments in my absence?” and Polk Hayes lounged into the room, with the same daring listlessness that he had used in trying to hold me in his arms out on the porch the night I had said good-by to him and Glendale, four years ago.

Henrietta’s chubby little body gave a wriggle of delight, and much sentiment beamed in her rugged, small face, as she answered him with enthusiasm, though not stopping to couch her reply in exactly complimentary terms.

“You don’t count, Pokie,” she exclaimed, as she made a good-natured face at him.

“That’s what Evelina said four years ago—­and she has proved it,” he answered her, looking at me just exactly as if he had never left off doing it since that last dance.

“How lovely to find you in the same exuberant spirits in which I left you, Polk, dear,” I exclaimed, as I got up to go and shake hands with him, as he had sunk into the most comfortable chair in the room, without troubling to bestow that attention upon me.

Some men’s hearts beat with such a strong rhythm that every feminine heart which comes within hearing distance immediately catches step, and goes to waltzing.  It has been four years since mine swung around against his, at that dance, but I’m glad Cousin Martha was there, and interrupted, us enough to make me drag my eyes from his, as he looked up and I looked down.