“I feel like shaking the very life out of you, Rose Mary Alloway,” was his tender form of greeting.

“You’re squeezing it out,” came in all the voice that Rose Mary could command for an answer.  And the broad-shouldered, burden-bearing, independent woman that was the Rose of Old Harpeth melted into just a tender girl who crushed her heart against her lover’s and clung as meekly as any slip of vine to her young lord oak.  “But I don’t care,” she finished up under his chin.  And Everett’s laugh that greeted and accepted her unexpected meekness rang through the hall and brought a commotion in answer.

The wee dogs, keen both of ear and scent, shot like small electric volts from Stonie’s couch, hurled themselves through the hall and sprang almost waist-high against Everett’s side in a perfect ecstasy of welcome.  They yelped and barked and whined and nosed in a tumbling heap of palpitating joy until he was obliged to hold Rose Mary in one arm while he made an attempt to respond to and abate their enthusiasm with the other.

“Now, now, that’s all right!  Nice dogs, nice dogs!” he was answering and persuading, when a stern call from the depths of Miss Lavinia’s room, the door of which Rose Mary had left ajar, abstracted her from Everett’s arm on the instant and sent her hurrying to answer the summons.

“Is that young man come back? and light the candle,” Miss Lavinia demanded and commanded in the same breath.  And just as Rose Mary flared up the dim light on the table by the bed Everett himself stood in the doorway.  With one glance his keen eyes took in the situation in the dim room in which the two old wayfarers lay prepared for the morning journey, and what Miss Lavinia’s stately and proper greeting would have been to him none of them ever knew, for with a couple of strides he was over by the bed at Rose Mary’s side and had taken the stern old lady into his strong arms and landed a kiss on the ruffle of white nightcap just over her left ear.

“No leaving the Briars this season, Miss Lavinia,” he said in a laughing, choking voice as he bent across and extracted one of little Miss Amandy’s hands from the tight bunch she had curled herself into under the edge of her pillow and bestowed a squeeze thereon.  “It’s all fixed up over at Boliver this afternoon.  There’s worse than oil on the place—­and it’s all yours now for keeps.”  With Rose Mary in his arms Everett had entirely forgotten to announce to her such a minor fact as the saving of her lands and estate, but to the two little old ladies his sympathy had made him give the words of reprieve with his first free breath.  The bundles on the floor and the old trunk had smote his heart with a fierce pain that the impulsive warmth of his greeting and the telling of his rescue could only partly ease.

“The news only reached me day before—­” he was going on to explain when, candle in hand, Uncle Tucker appeared in the doorway.  His long-tailed night-shirt flapped around his bare, thin old legs, and every separate gray lock stood by itself and rampant, while his eyes seemed deeper and more mystic than ever.