let him go, and that I was to be his mother. If you could have seen the
angelic look on that thin, white face you would have known that life is
eternal, and that the spirit is all there is to anything. He stared
straight at me with his pale brow wrinkled as if it was too good to be
so, and then when I convinced him, he put his arms around my neck and
hugged me tight, and sobbed and sobbed in pure joy."

Dixie was shedding tears herself now, and, with a heaving breast and
lowered head, she walked along beside her awed and silent companion.
They had entered a wood through which the road passed, and there seemed
to be a hallowed stillness in the cool, grayish touch of the coming
night that pervaded the boughs and foliage of the trees. Beyond the wood
a mountain-peak rose in a blaze of molten gold from the oblique rays of
the setting sun, but here the night-dews were beginning to fall and the
chirping insects of the dark were waking. In the marshy spots frogs were
croaking and snarling, and fireflies were cutting, to their kind perhaps
readable, hieroglyphics on the leafy background. Presently she wiped her
eyes, and smiled up at him.

"What a goose I am!" she said. "As old as I am, I'll cry if you crook
your finger at me. You went to Carlton yesterday, didn't you?"

"Yes," he replied, glad to see her emotion over, uplifting and rare as
its nature was.

"Did you happen to see my young man?" A smile he failed to see in the
shadows was playing sly tricks with her lineaments.

"_Your_ young man? You mean--"

"You know who I mean. I mean my beau--Mr. Jasper Long, Esquire,
merchant, cotton-handler, and rich capitalist."

"Yes, I saw him," Henley said, reluctantly. "I didn't make a point of
looking him up. He ran about searching for me. I've washed my hands of
that--that matter, Dixie. I ain't no hand at match-making, nohow. It
ain't my turn. I get all mixed up, and blunder at it. I'll never set
myself up to pick out a--a suitable mate for any woman again. There
ain't none in existence--there ain't none half good enough for you,
nohow. It makes me sick to--to think about a fellow like--well, no
better in many ways than this here Long is--having the gall to think
he--that you'd be willing to live with him the rest of your days as if
there was a single thing in common betwixt you. He told me about what he
done--what he _tried_ to do out at the fence when he started off the
other night, and, _well_--"

"Well what?" she cr