“Bring Pete out at about eleven.  Your first pea is due to pod about noon.  No, I must go now or never,” said Sam as he shook me off when I clung and begged for another dance.  He climbed up in the wagon.  “Good night,” he called.

For a long time I stood and watched him standing bolt upright in the wagon and clattering away with his great ugly old mule in a lurching trot; then I went in to the dance.  I didn’t tell anybody that Sam had been there, because they would all have been disappointed.  The way Sam’s home town loves him and disapproves of his farming is pathetic.  Five miles is a long way for anybody that knows Sam to be separated from him, at least that is the way I felt as Peter slid and skidded and dipped me around while he told me how proud he was of my beauty and the lovely and worthy friends I possessed.  He mentioned Julia and Pink and the mules in detail.  I think Peter Vandyne has the most grateful, appreciative, sympathetic nature I ever encountered, and I told him so as we walked home across the lawn while the stars were beginning to grow pale and flicker with no more night to burn.

“My heart is full, full, dear, dearest Betty, with you and—­and the work.  The vision becomes clearer,” Peter said, with his great dark eyes looking up at the retreating stars.  And as we walked up the steps he told me another struggle he had thought up for the hero to have with his conscience about the poor little waiting heroine.  The mule story hadn’t done him one bit of good, and I went to bed as cross as two sticks.

“Oh, Samboy!  I’m glad you are there and that you are Peter’s next of friends or first or—­Good night!” I muttered, as I closed my eyes on my favorite glimpse of Old Harpeth.

The next morning at about nine-thirty occurred Peter Vandyne’s introduction into real life.  He took it gallantly with his head up and swimming for shore.

The day was one of young May’s maiden efforts offered with a soft smile of tender sunshine and in a flutter of bird wing and apple-blow.  Of course, Sam had told me not to bring Peter out to The Briers until about eleven o’clock, because he wanted to do some farm housekeeping, as I afterward found out.  But half past nine was the very limit of my endurance, and I sat and fidgeted with the wheel while mother and Eph packed us up with the inevitable basket for Byrd plus the also inevitable “little ones” that daddy somehow managed to find for him.  These young were three small kittens, attended in their blindness by a black-and-white-spotted mother cat, all safely laced into a large basket and by that time resigned to their fate.  I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to dear Peter in my thoughts, but somehow they reminded me of him as he was led to farm life; and I laughed outright as Eph gave Peter a parting pat and Redwheels and me a shove, while mother called after us not to forget the sarsaparilla.