Now Lu Nimham, the beautiful Indian girl whom Perez had noticed in
meeting sitting beside Prudence Fennell, had another lover besides Abe
Konkapot, no other in fact than Abe's own brother Jake. Abe had been
to the war and Jake had not, and Lu, as might have been expected from
a girl whose father and brother had fallen at White Plains in the
Continental uniform, preferred the soldier lover to the other. But not
so the widow Nimham, her mother, in whose eyes Jake's slightly better
worldly prospects gave him the advantage. It so happened that soon
after dusk, Wednesday evening, Abe, drawn by a tender inward stress
betook himself to the lonely dell in the extreme west part of the
village, now called Glendale, where the hut of the Nimham family
stood. His discomfiture was great on finding Jake already comfortably
installed in the kitchen and basking in Lu's society. He did not
linger. The widow did not invite him to stop; in fact, not to put too
fine a point upon it, she intimated that it would be just as well if
he were to finish his call some other time. Lu indeed threw sundry
tender commiserating glances in his direction, but her mother watched
her like a cat, and mothers in those times were a good deal more in
the way than they are nowadays.
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