note--Don't you--don't you--how shall
I say it? Don't you think you and I could meet and speak to one another
somewhere instead of always writing like this? Somewhere where no one
could see us. Do you know--do you know--do you, ahem! O dear me--know that
just inside our gate there's a little arbour. The tiniest place. When I
was a child I used to play there with Mary at keeping house, there's a
seat just big enough for two and we used to sit there with our dolls. No
one can see the gate from the lower piazza, and the gate doesn't make any
noise opening, for father had it oiled--it used to squeak a bit from rust,
but it doesn't now and I'll be there to-morrow night at nine--in the
arbour--at least I _may_ be there. I just want to tell you in a way I
can't in a letter that my people aren't the sort of folk to sneer at any
one because they have lost money.

"I am sending this by P.

"The arbour is just back of the big magnolia as you come in, on the
left."

Phyl gave a little laugh. Then with half-closed eyes she kissed the
letter, laid it softly on the floor beside the first and went on to the
next.

"Not to-night. I have to go to the Calhouns. It is just as well, for I
have a dread of people suspecting if we meet too often. No one sees us
meet. No one knows, and yet I fear them finding out just by instinct.
Father said to me the other day, 'What makes you seem so happy these
times?' If Mary had been alive she would have found out long ago, for I
never could keep anything hid from her. I was nearly saying to him, 'If
you want to know why I am so happy go and ask the magnolia tree by the
gate.'

"Sometimes I feel as if I were deceiving him and everybody. I am, and I
don't care--I don't care if they knew. O my darling! My darling! My
darling! If the whole world were against you I would love you all the
more. I will love you all my life and I will love you when I am dead."

Phyl's eyes grew half blind with tears.

This cry from the Past went to her heart like a knife. The wind,
strengthening for a moment, moved the window curtains, bringing with it
the drowsy afternoon sounds of Charleston, sounds that seemed to mock at
this voice declaring the deathlessness of its love. It was impossible to
go on reading. Impossible to expose any more this heart that had ceased to
beat.

The meetings in the arbour behind the magnolia tree, the kisses, the words
that the leaves and birds alone could hear--they had all ended in dea