eaven to be possible--things that made all my
troubles fly away, but now I see it was just in my imagination. I'm
going to be sensible from now on if it kills me. You can't keep on in
the miserable way you are living. You've always thought you'd escape the
worst by marrying, and I have no right because this here hell is raging
in me to tell you who, or who not, to take. I'd rather see you--you dead
in your coffin than the--the wife of that silly fool. But that's your
business--that's--that's--" His voice broke and he stood quivering, his
strong face torn into shreds by despair.

"You dear, dear boy!" Dixie said, laying her disengaged hand gently on
his arm, her own face suffused with a faint glow of uncontrollable
tenderness. "I'm only a girl--a natural one, Alfred--and I'm so hungry
for love that I try to make you say those things, wrong as they may be.
Don't you know when I'm joking? Listen and I'll tell you the truth. I
wrote Jasper Long that it was all right about what he'd tried to do. I'd
not hold any grudge against him, but that I knew I never could care for
him, and I hoped he'd never come to see me again."

"You--you wrote 'im that?" Henley gasped.

"Oh, Alfred," she cried, as she released his arm, "don't you know that I
could not marry a man I don't love? Don't you know what has been growing
up in me all this time in which you with your unhappiness and me with my
misfortune have been drawed so close together? Every night, as I say my
prayers and call on God to help you, I wonder what He meant by the bonds
with which He's tied me to you hand and foot, heart and soul. When you
was trying to find me a husband, and fighting for my legal rights, you
thought it was just friendship, and so did I. The world we live in
counts it one of the blackest of sins for a married man and an unmarried
girl to love each other, but you know we didn't do wrong intentionally.
We was as innocent and unsuspecting as lambs in the fold. Right when we
thought we was doing our duty the ground was slipping from under us, and
we was clutching each other to keep from falling. Now, that's all I'm
going to say. I shall never marry any man while this feeling is in my
breast. That would be wrong for a dead certainty, let folks say what
they please about the other. Your wife went off to-day, didn't she? I
saw Warren's carriage drive up and knew something was going to happen;
then the old man come over and told us about it."

She had passed thro