.

THICKET POINT.
It WAS a point with Mr.Ware to see just as little as possible of Betty.
He had no taste for what he called female chatter.

A sane interest in the price of cotton or pork he considered the only rational test of human intelligence, and Betty evinced entire indifference where those great staples were concerned, hence it was agreeable to him to have most of his meals served in his office.
At first Betty had sought to adapt herself to his somewhat peculiar scheme of life, but Tom had begged her not to regard him, his movements from hour to hour were cloaked in uncertainty.

The man who had to overlook the labor of eighty or ninety field hands was the worst sort of a slave himself; the niggers knew when they could sit down to a meal; he never did.
But for all his avoidance of Betty, he in reality kept the closest kind of a watch on her movements, and when he learned that she had visited Charley Norton--George, the groom, was the channel through which this information reached him--he was both scandalized and disturbed.

He felt the situation demanded some sort of a protest.
"Isn't it just hell the way a woman can worry you ?" he lamented, as he hurried up the path from the barns to the house.