“Please help us to persuade Evelina to come and live with James and me, Polk, dear,” she said, glancing at him with the deepest confidence and affection in her eyes.  There is no age-limit to Polk’s victims, and Cousin Martha had always adored him.

“All women do, Evelina, why not you—­live with James?” he asked, and I thought I detected a mocking flicker in his big, hazel, dangerous eyes.

“If I ever need protection it will be James—­and Cousin Martha I will run to for it—­but I never will,” I answered him, very simply, with not a trace of the defiance I was fairly flinging at him in either my voice or manner.

Paris and London and New York are nice safe places to live in, in comparison with Glendale, Tennessee, in some respects.  I wonder why I hadn’t been more scared than I was last night, as the train whirled me down into proximity to Polk Hayes.  But then I had had four years of forgetting him stored up as a bulwark.

“But what are you going to do, Evelina?” Sallie again began to question, with positive alarm in her voice, and I saw that it was time for me to produce some sort of a protector then and there—­or capitulate.

And I record the fact that I wanted to go home with Sallie and Cousin Martha and the babies and—­and live under the roof of the Mossback forever.  All that citizenship-feeling I had got poured into me from Jane and had tried on Dickie, good old Dickie, had spilled out of me at the first encounter with Polk.

There is a great big hunt going on in this world, and women are the ones only a short lap ahead.  Can we turn and make good the fight—­or won’t we be torn to death?  It has come to this it seems:  women must either be weak, and cling so close to man that she can’t be struck, keep entirely out of the range of his fists and arms,—­or develop biceps equal to his.  Jane ought to have had me in training longer, for I’m discovering that I’m weak—­of biceps.

“Are you coming—­are you coming to live with us, Evelina?  Are you coming?  Answer!” questioned the small Henrietta, as she stood commandingly in front of me.

“Please, Evelina,” came in a coax from Sallie, while the Kit crawled over and caught at my skirt as Cousin Martha raised her eyes to mine, with a gentle echo of the combined wooings.

Then suddenly into Polk’s eyes flamed still another demand, that something told me I would have to answer later.  I had capitulated and closed this book forever when the deliverance came.

Jasper, a little older, but as black and pompous as ever, stood in the doorway, and a portly figure, with yellow, shining face, on the step behind him.

“Why, Uncle Jasper, how did you know I was here?” I exclaimed, as I fairly ran to hold out my hand to him.

“Mas’ James sont me word last night, and I woulder been here by daybreak, Missie, ’cept I had to hunt dis yere suitable woman to bring along with me.  Make your ’beesence to Miss Evelina, Lucy Petunia,” he commanded.