alm and starlight and the spirit of flowers, breathed out in
odours. The quaint and pretty tune rose and fell, quavered, lilted
along as it listed without regard for law and order. It struck
Miss Mattie to the heart. Her girlhood, with its misty dreams of
happiness, came back to her on the wings of music.

"Isn't that a sweet tune," she said, with a lump in her throat.

She went up into her room and sat down a moment in confusion,
trying to grasp the reality of all that had happened. In the
middle of the belief that these things were not so, came the regret
of a sensitive mind for errors committed. She remembered with a
sudden sinking, that she had not thanked him for the necklace--and
the money lay even now on the parlor table, where he had cast it!
This added the physical fear of thieves. Down she went and got the
money, counted out, to her unmitigated astonishment, five hundred
dollars and thrust it beneath her pillow with a shiver. She wished
she had thought to tell him to take care of it--but suppose the
thieves were to fall on him as he slept? Red's friends would have
spent their sympathy on the thieves. She rejoiced that the money
was where it was. Then she tried to remember what she had said
throughout the evening.

"Well, I suppose I must have acted like a ninny," she concluded.
"But isn't he just splendid!" and as Cousin Will's handsome face,
with its daring, kind eyes, came to her vision she felt comforted.
"I don't believe but what he'll make every allowance for how
excited I was," said she. "He seems to understand those things,
for all he's such a large man. Well, it doesn't seem as if it
could be true." With a half sigh Miss Mattie knelt and sent up her
modest petition to her Maker and got into her little white bed.

In the meantime Red's actions would have awakened suspicion. He
hunted around until he found a tin can, then lit a match and
rummaged the barn, amid terror-stricken squawks from the
inhabitants, the hens.

"One, two, three, four," he counted. "Reckon I can last out till
morning on that. Mattie, she's white people--just the nicest I
ever saw, but she ain't used to providing for a full-grown man."

He stepped to the back of the barn and looked about him. "Nobody
can see me from here," he said, in satisfaction. Then he scraped
together a pile of chips and sticks and built a fire, filled the
tin can at the brook, sat it on two stones over the fire, rolled
himself a cigare