Trouble With Harry Read Online Free PDF

but one was born dead. I was just making sure the two kittens were all right. Who do you have to marry?”
    â€œWhom,” Plum corrected absently, her heart still pounding from the scene in the blacksmith’s. “I am going to marry—hope to marry—a Mr. T. Harris. If he’ll have me, that is.”
    â€œOh,” Thom said and bent down to return the kitten to the nest she had made for Maple and her babies.
    â€œ Oh? Is that it? You’re not going to ask me who Mr. T. Harris is, nor why I am going to marry him?”
    Thom rose and dusted her sooty hands off on her lavender gown, Plum noted with a mental sigh. It wasn’t the soiling of the gown she regretted, it was the tomboy nature of her niece. Thom was twenty years old, a young woman of intelligence and high spirits, of a good, if impoverished, family, and if she wasn’t the loveliest woman on the face of the earth, she was very pretty, with cropped chestnut curls, large dark gray eyes, and a very sweet smile. When she smiled, which Plum had to admit wasn’t often, Thom being a serious, takes-everything-literally sort who would rather spend time with the various animals she had collected than with the two-legged variety most young women preferred.
    â€œAlthough how you are to catch a husband with no dowry, and a notorious aunt, is beyond me.” Plum sighed again, this time aloud.
    Thom cocked her head and watched as Plum plucked off her bonnet and sank down into the rickety chair next to the fire. “I thought it was you who were planning to marry? I’ve told you before that I have no desire to marry. Men are so”—she wrinkled her nose as if she smelled cabbage cooking—“silly. Stupid. Mindless. I have yet to meet one who makes any sort of sense. To tell you the truth, I don’t think there are any. I will do quite well without one of my own, thank you.”
    â€œOh, Thom,” Plum said, on the verge of tears but unable to keep from smiling at her niece’s dismissal of men as a whole. “What would I do without you?”
    â€œWell, I imagine just what you are doing now,” Thom replied. “You do seem to have the habit of talking to yourself, Aunt Plum, so if I weren’t here, you’d probably be right where you are, telling the room that you’re going to marry Mr. Harris. Who is Mr. Harris?”
    Plum blessed the day Thom came to her. If anyone could make her laugh at herself, it was her niece. “Mr. T. Harris is a man in search of a wife, and as I am a woman in search of a husband, I am hoping that we will suit one another. You wouldn’t mind me marrying, would you, Thom? You know I wouldn’t marry a man who couldn’t keep you, as well.”
    Thom shrugged and filled a small cracked saucer with the last of the milk, setting it down next to the new mother. “If it will make you happy, I don’t mind in the least, as long as Mr. Harris won’t mind me bringing my animals. I couldn’t leave them behind.”
    â€œNo, of course not,” Plum said, trying to envision just how she was going to tell her prospective husband that not only was he gaining a wife and a niece but three cats, six dogs, two goats, four tame mice, and a pheasant that thought it was a rooster. Her mind boggled at that thought. She shook her head, clearing it of the morose thought that she was doomed, and rose to find a relatively clean scrap of paper before settling down at the table to write a letter so dazzling, it would be sure to capture Mr. Harris’s attention. “I pray he is an honest, likable man with no secrets that will come back to haunt me. I just don’t think I could stand another husband with secrets.”

Three
    â€œHow many applicants remain, Temple?” Harry asked, wearily pushing up his spectacles as he leaned back in the private room bespoken at the local inn for the purpose of conducting interviews.
    Temple consulted his