"With happiness, Miss Holland;" and he did not feel one shrinking
thought again as he ran the gantlet of the idle fellows of the town,
many of them his former vagrant playmates. Rhoda was perfectly happy. He
would have taken her to his grandmother's, with whom he kept house, but
that aristocratic old dowager might say something, he considered, to
destroy Rhoda's confidence in her elegant appearance and easy
vocabulary; and they walked past Teackle Hall, where Vesta saw them, and
opened the door and made them come in and eat a little. Rhoda at first
showed some uneasiness under this great pile of habitation, but Vesta
was so natural and gracious that the shyness wore off, and, at a fitting
moment, the bride said:
"Rhoda, my dear, there is a bonnet up-stairs I expect to wear this
winter, and I want to try it on you, whom I think it will particularly
become."
Rhoda's quiet eyes flashed as she saw the new article and heard Vesta
praise it, upon her head. The old bonnet had received a cruel blow, in
spite of Mrs. Somers.
Tilghman, too, accused himself that he felt a little relieved when he
escorted Rhoda back to Meshach's in another bonnet, and Vesta followed,
with her great shaggy dog, Turk; she not unconscious--though serene and
thoughtfully polite to all she knew--of people peering at her in wonder
and excitement from every door and window of the town. The news was
working in every household, from the servants in the kitchens to the
aged people helped to their food with bib and spoon, that the famed
daughter of Daniel Custis was the prize of the junk dealer and usurer
in "old town" by the bridge, who had enslaved a wife at last.
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