arm. Myron wanted, in the irritation of the moment,
to shake it off, but he was a man of dignity, and forbore. His wife was
speaking in a very gentle tone, but somehow different from the one he
was used to noting.

"Myron, ain't you goin' to hear me?"

"I ain't goin' to listen to any tomfoolery, and I ain't goin' to have
anybody dictatin' to me about my own business."

"It ain't your business, Myron, any more'n 'tis mine. Hermie's much my
son as he is your'n, and what you bought that place with is as much mine
as 'tis your'n. I helped you earn it. Myron, it's comin' up in me. I can
feel it."

"What is?"

In spite of all his old dull certainties, he felt the shock of wonder.
He looked at her, her scarlet cheeks and widening eyes. Even her pretty
hair seemed to have acquired a nervous life, and stood out in a
quivering aureole. Myron was much bound to his Caddie in his way of
being attached to his own life and breath. A change in her was horrible
to him, like the disturbance of illness in an ordered house.

"What is it?" he inquired again. "What is it you feel?"

"It's that," she said, with an added vehemence. "It's my double
personality."

Myron Dill could have wept from the surprise of it all, the assault upon
his wondering nerves.

"You spread up the bed in the bedroom, Caddie," he bade her, "and go lay
down a spell."

"No," said his wife, "I sha'n't lay down, and I sha'n't give up to you.
It's riz up in me, the one that's goin' to beat, no matter what comes of
it, same as old Abner Kinsman stood up ag'inst the British. Mebbe it'll
die fightin', same's he did, and I never'll hear no more from it,--and a
good riddance. But Myron, it's goin' to beat."

Her husband was frowning, not harshly now, but from the extremity of his
distress. He spoke in a tone of well-considered adjuration.

"Caddie, you know what you're doin' of? You're settin' up your will in
place o' mine."

"Oh, no, I ain't, Myron," she responded eagerly, with an earnest motion
toward him, as if she besought him to put faith in her. "It ain't me
that's doin' it."

"It ain't you? Who is it, then?"

"Why, it's my double personality. Ain't I just told you so?"

Myron stood gazing at her in the futility of comprehension he had felt
years ago, when Caddie, who had been "a great reader," as the neighbors
said, before the avalanche of household cares had overwhelmed her,
propounded to him, while he was drawing off his boots for an hour of
twil