A Man of Honor
Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. Mr. Pagebrook Eats his Breakfast. ROBERT PAGEBROOK had never seen his cousin, and yet they were not altogether strangers to each other. Robert's father and William Barksdale's mother were brother and sister, and Shirley, the old Virginian homestead, which had been in the family for nearly two centuries, had passed to young Barksdale's mother by the voluntary act of Robert's father when, upon coming of age, he had gone west to try his fortune in a busier world than that of the Old Dominion. The two boys, William and Robert, had corresponded quite regularly in boyhood and quite irregularly after they grew up, and so they knew each other pretty well, though, as I have said, they had never met. " I am glad, very glad to see you, William," said Robert as he grasped his cousin's hand. " Now don't, I
...beg of you. Call me Billy, or Will, or anything else you choose, old fellow, but don't call me William, whatever you do. Nobody ever did but father, and he never did except of mornings when I wouldn't get up. Then he'd sing out ' Will-wm' with a sort of ahorsewhip snap at the end of it. 'William' always reminds me of disturbed slumbers. Call me Billy, and I'll call you Bob. I'll do that anyhow, so you might as well fall into familiar ways. But come, tell me how you are and all about yourself. You haven't written to me since the flood; forgot to receive my last letter I suppose." " Probably I did. I have been forgetting a good many things. But I hope I have not kept you too long from ybur breakfast, and especially that I have not made you 'as cross as a twenty dollar bank-note.' Pray tell me what you meant by that figure of speech, will you not ? I am curious to know where you got it and why." "Ha! ha!" laughed Billy. "You'll have a lively time of it if you mean...
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