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It was, however, past the fortitude of woman to behold without protest this desecration of decoration. Peninnah Penelope Anne sprang forward, snatched the glossy locks from the puncheons, and with a tender hand righted the structure, while the powder flew about in light puffs at her touch, readjusting a curl here and a cleverly wrought wave there. The valet’s pious aspiration from the doorway, “Bress de Lord!” betokened the acuteness of the danger over-past.

“Why, grandfather!” the girl admonished Mivane; “your beautiful peruke!–sure, sir, the loveliest curls in the world! And sets you like your own hair,–only that nobody could really have such very genteel curls to grow–Oh–oh–grandfather!”

She did not offer to return it, but stood with it poised on one hand, well out of harm’s way, while she surveyed Mivane reproachfully yet with expectant sympathy.

Perhaps he himself was glad that he could wreak no further damage which he would later regret, and contented himself with furiously pounding his cane upon the puncheon floor, a sturdy structure and well calculated to bear the brunt of such expressions of pettish rage.

“Dolt, ass, fool, that I am!” he cried. “That I should so far forget myself as to offer to go as an ambassador to the herders on the Keowee!” And once more he banged the floor after a fashion that discounted the thumping of the batten, and the room resounded with the thwacks.

An old dog, a favorite of yore, lying asleep on the hearth, only opened his eyes and wrinkled his brows to make sure, it would seem, who had the stick; then closing his lids peacefully snoozed away again, presently snoring in the fullness of his sense of security. But a late acquisition, a gaunt deerhound, after an earnest observation of his comrade’s attitude, as if referring the crisis to his longer experience, scrutinized severally the faces of the members of the family, and, wincing at each resounding whack, finally gathered himself together apprehensively, as doubtful whose turn might come next, and discreetly slunk out unobserved by the back door.

Peninnah Penelope Anne rushed to the rescue.

“And why should you not be an ambassador, sir?” she demanded.

“Why–why–because, girl, I am deafer than the devil’s dam! I cannot fetch and carry messages of import. I could only give occasion for ridicule and scorn in even offering to assume such an office.”

Peninnah Penelope Anne had flushed with the keen sensitiveness of her pride. She instantly appreciated the irking of the dilemma into which he had thrust himself forgetting his infirmity, and she could have smitten with hearty enmity and a heavy stick any lips which had dared to smile. She responded, however, with something of her mother’s indirection.

“Under your favor, sir, you don’t know how deaf the devil’s dam may be–and it is not your wont to speak in that strain. I’m sure it reminds me of that man they call ‘X,’–a sort of churl person,–who talks of the devil and blue blazes and brimstone and hell as if–as if he were a native.”

This was a turning of the sword of the pious “X” upon himself with a vengeance, for he was prone in his spiritual disquisitions to detail much of the discomfort of the future state that awaited his careless friends.

The allusion so far pleased old Mivane, who resented a suspected relegation of himself to a warm station in the schemes of “X,” that, although his head was still bald and shining like a billiard ball, he suffered himself to drop into his chair, his stick resting motionless on the long-suffering puncheon floor.

“If I could only hear for a day I’d forgive twenty soundless years!” he declared piteously, for he so deprecated the enforced withdrawal from the enterprise that he had heedlessly undertaken, and felt so keenly the reflections upon his sentiments and sincerity surreptitiously canvassed between Ronackstone and “X,” and then cavalierly rehearsed in his presence.

“You are only deaf to certain whanging voices in queer keys,” his granddaughter declared.