CHAPTER VII

The next morning the Bazar was open at the regular hour. Shoppers open at the regular hour. Shoppers came as numerously as before. People were as eager as ever to enhance their charms or disguise their flaws. In a few days Asaph Shillaber was again in his office. He wore black always, and a black tie, and he moved about with mourning in his manner.

A month later his cravat was brown, not black, and the next week it was red. He was taking more care of his costume. He talked more with the women customers, especially the young women, and he did not keep his eye anxiously on the front door. He rubbed his hands once more, recommending his goods.

In a few months younger girls were behind many of the counters. Deborah felt that youth was invading and replacing. She wondered how soon her turn would come. It would be a sad day, for she loved the work.

But she took some reassurance from the praises of Asaph. He paused now and then to compliment her on a sale or her progress. He led up to her some of his most particular customers and introduced her with a flourish. Sometimes he paused as he went down the aisle, and turned back to stare at her. She knew that she had blushed, because her face was hot, and once Mrs. Crankshaw, who was trying to match a sample, whispered to her:

"Say, Deborah, what kind of rouge do you use? It gives you the nicest color, and it looks like real."

When Deborah denied that she painted, the undertaker's wife was angry. She thought Deborah was trying to copyright her complexion. Deborah's cheeks tactfully turned pale again, now that Asaph had taken his strange eyes from her, and now the woman said:

"You're right; it's your own. It comes and goes! Look, now it's coming back again."

And so was Asaph. When Mrs. Crankshaw had moved off Asaph hung about awkwardly. Finally he put the backs of his knuckles on the counter and leaned across to murmur:

"Say, Debby, I was telling Jim Crawford yesterday that you made more sales than any other clerk in the shop this last month."

"Oh, really, did I?" Deborah gasped, her eyes snapping like electric sparks. They seemed to jolt Asaph; he fell back a little. Then he leaned closer.

"Crawford said he'd like to have you in his store. I told him you were a fixture here. Don't you leave me, Debby. You won't, will you?"

"Why, Asaph!" she cried.

"Leastways, you'll let me know any offer you get before you take it. You can promise me that, can't you?"

"Of course I will, but- Well, I never!"

This last was true. She never had known till now that superlative rapture of a woman, to have one man trying to take her away from another. Debby had not known it even as a little girl, for if two boys claimed the same dance-which had happened rarely enough-they did not wrangle and fight, but each yielded to the other with a courtesy that was odious.

On her way home Deborah began to doubt the possibility of it all. Asaph had been talking about somebody else, or he had been joking-he was such a terrible fellow to cook up things and fool people! Or else Jim Crawford was just making fun of Asaph. She would not tell her mother this news.

That night, as she was washing the dishes after her late supper, the door-bell burred.

"You go, mother, will you? My hands are all suds."

Mrs. Larrabee hobbled slowly to the hall door, but came back with a burst of unsuspected speed. She was pale with fright.

"It's a man!" she whispered.

"A man! Who could it be?" Debby gasped.

"One of those daylight burglars, prob'ly. What 'll we do?"

"We could run out the back door while he's at the front."

"He might have a confederut waiting to grab us there."

"That's so!"

What possible motive a burglar could have for grabbing these two women, what possible value they would have for him, they did not inquire. But Debby, in the new executive habit of her mind, grew bold enough to take at least a peek at the stranger.

The bell continued to ring while she tiptoed into the parlor and lifted the shade slightly aside. She speedily recognized a familiar suit.

"It's old Jim Crawford," she said.

There was a panic of another sort now, getting Debby's hands dry, her sleeves down, her apron off, her hair puffed, the lamp in the parlor lighted. Old Jim Crawford was some minutes older before he was admitted.

It was the first male caller Deborah had had since her mother could remember. The old lady received him with a flourish that would have befitted a king. That he was a widower and, for Carthage, wealthy may have had something to do with it. A fantastic hope that at last somebody had come to propose to Deborah excited her mother so that she took herself out of the way as soon as the weather had been decently discussed.

Mr. Crawford made a long and ponderous effort at small talk and came round to his errand with the subtlety of an ocean liner warping into its slip. At length he mumbled that if Miss Debby ever got tired of Shillaber's there was a chance he might make a place for her in his own store. O' course, times was dull, and he had more help 'n he'd any call for, but he was a man who believed in bein' neighborly to old friends, and, knowin' her father and all-

It was such a luxury to Deborah to be sought after, even with this hippopotamine stealth, that she rather prolonged the suspense and teased Crawford to an offer, and to an increase in that before she told him that she would have to "think it over."

He lingered on the porch steps to offer Deborah "anything within reason," but she still told him she would think it over. When she thought it over she felt that it would be base ingratitude to desert Asaph Shillaber, who had saved her from starvation by taking her into his beautiful shop. No bribe should decoy her thence so long as he wanted her.

She did not even tell Asaph about it the next day. A week later he asked her if Crawford had spoken to her. She said that he had mentioned the subject, but that, of course, she had refused to consider leaving the man who had done everything in the world for her.

This shy announcement seemed to exert an immense effect on Asaph. He thanked her as if she had saved his life. And he stared at her more than ever.

A few evenings later there was another ring at the Larrabee bell. This time Mrs. Larrabee showed no alarm except that she might be late to the door. It was Asaph! He was as sheepish as a boy. He said that it was kind of lonesome over to his house and, seeing their light, he kind of thought he'd drop round and be a little neighborly. Everybody was growing more neighborly nowadays.

Once more Mrs. Larrabee vanished. As she sat in the dining-room, pretending to knit, she thought how good it was to have a man in the house. The rumble of a deep voice was so comfortable that she fell asleep long before Asaph could bring himself to going home.

He had previously sought diversion in the society of some of the very young and very pretty salesgirls in his store, but he found that, for all their graces, their prattle bored him. They talked all about themselves or their friends. Debby talked to Asaph about Asaph. He and she had been children together-they were of the same generation; she was a sensible woman, and she had learned much at the counter-school. He got to dropping round right often.

That long-silent door bell became a thing to listen for of evenings. Jim Crawford dropped round now and then; the elderly floor-walker at Shillaber's dropped round one night and talked styles and fabrics and gossip in a cackling voice. When he had left, the matchmaker's instinct led Mrs. Larrabee to warn Debby not to waste her time on him. "Two old maids talkin' at once is more'n I can stand."

Three times that year Newt Meldrum was in town and called on Deborah. She asked him to supper once, and he simply raved over the salt-rising biscuits and the peach-pusserves. After supper he asked if he might smoke. That was the last word in masculine possession. If frankincense and myrrh had been shaken about the room Debby and Mrs. Larrabee could not have cherished them as they did the odor of tobacco in the curtains next day. Mrs. Larrabee cried a little. Her husband had smoked.

Deborah was only now passing through the stages the average woman travels in her teens and early twenties, Deborah was having callers. Sometimes two men came at once and tried to freeze each other out. And finally she had a proposal!-from Asaph!-from Josie's and Birdaline's Asaph! They had left him alone with Debby once too often.

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