Some men's hearts beat with such a strong rhythm that every feminine
heart which comes within hearing distance immediately catches step, and
goes to waltzing. It has been four years since mine swung around
against his, at that dance, but I'm glad Cousin Martha was there, and
interrupted, us enough to make me drag my eyes from his, as he looked up
and I looked down.
"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.
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