"Oh, I don't know--it's no harm once in a way," answered Nash, who had exerted himself wonderfully, and finished up by drinking his share of wine. "Miles had his ways, and I have mine."
"All right: it is your own affair. But I wouldn't have done one thing, my good friend--sent an invitation to your mother-in-law."
"What mother-in-law?" asked Nash, staring.
"Your ex-mother-in-law, I ought to have said--Mrs. Tinkle. I wouldn't have done it, Caromel, under the circumstances. It pained her."
"But who did send her an invitation? Is it likely? I don't know what you are talking about, Squire."
"Oh, that's it, is it?" returned the Squire, perceiving that the act was madam's and not his. "Have you ever had those particulars of Charlotte's death?"
Nash Caromel's face changed from red to a deadly pallor: the question unnerved him--took his wits out of him.
"The particulars of Charlotte's death," he stammered, looking all abroad. "What particulars?"
"Why, those promised you by the man who wrote from San Francisco--Munn, was his name? Charlotte's diary, and letters, and things, that he was sending off to New York."
"Oh--ay--I remember," answered Nash, pulling his senses together. "No, they have not come."
"Been lost on the way, do you suppose? What a pity!"
"They may have been. I have not had them."
Nash Caromel walked straight away with the last words. Either to get rid of the subject, or to join some people who had just then crossed the top of the path.
"Caromel does not like talking of her: I can see that, Johnny," remarked the Squire to me later. "I don't believe he'd have done as he did, but for this second Charlotte throwing her wiles across his path. He fell into the snare and his conscience pricks him."
"I dare say, sir, it will come right with time. She is very pretty."
"Yes, most crooked things come straight with time," assented the Squire. "Perhaps this one will."
The weeks and the months went on. Caromel's Farm seemed to prosper, its mistress being a most active manager, ruling with an apparently soft will, but one firm as iron; and little Dun grew to be about fifteen months old. The cow might have behaved ungenteelly to him, as Miss Bailey's ghost says to Captain Smith, but it had not hurt the little fellow, or his stout legs either, which began now to be running him into all kinds of mischief. And so the time came round again to August--just a year after the fête, and nearly twenty-two months after Nash's second marriage.