she said thoughtfully. "But I can't tell it
even to you because I can't tell it well enough yet. I've a feeling that
there's only one way to tell it--and I don't know the way yet. Some day
I'll know it--and then I'll tell you, Bev."

Long, long after she kept her word. Forty years later I wrote to her,
across the leagues of land and sea that divided us, and told her that
Jasper Dale was dead; and I reminded her of her old promise and asked
its fulfilment. In reply she sent me the written love story of Jasper
Dale and Alice Reade. Now, when Alice sleeps under the whispering elms
of the old Carlisle churchyard, beside the husband of her youth, that
story may be given, in all its old-time sweetness, to the world.

CHAPTER XXV. THE LOVE STORY OF THE AWKWARD MAN

(Written by the Story Girl)

Jasper Dale lived alone in the old homestead which he had named Golden
Milestone. In Carlisle this giving one's farm a name was looked upon as
a piece of affectation; but if a place must be named why not give it
a sensible name with some meaning to it? Why Golden Milestone, when
Pinewood or Hillslope or, if you wanted to be very fanciful, Ivy Lodge,
might be had for the taking?

He had lived alone at Golden Milestone since his mother's death; he had
been twenty then and he was close upon forty now, though he did not look
it. But neither could it be said that he looked young; he had never at
any time looked young with common youth; there had always been something
in his appearance that stamped him as different from the ordinary run
of men, and, apart from his shyness, built up an intangible, invisible
barrier between him and his kind. He had lived all his life in Carlisle;
and all the Carlisle people knew of or about him--although they thought
they knew everything--was that he was painfully, abnormally shy. He
never went anywhere except to church; he never took part in Carlisle's
simple social life; even with most men he was distant and reserved; as
for women, he never spoke to or looked at them; if one spoke to him,
even if she were a matronly old mother in Israel, he was at once in an
agony of painful blushes. He had no friends in the sense of companions;
to all outward appearance his life was solitary and devoid of any human
interest.

He had no housekeeper; but his old house, furnished as it had been in
his mother's lifetime, was cleanly and daintily kept. The quaint rooms
were as free from dust and disorder as a woman