ough to be a wife to you, just now, and you know it. And I couldn't
keep a house fit for you, and you couldn't afford to keep ME without it.
And then it would be all known, and it wouldn't be us two, dear, and our
lonely meetings any more. And we couldn't be engaged--that would be too
much like me and Seth over again. That's what you mean, dandy boy--for
you're only a dandy boy, you know, and they don't get married to
backwood Southern girls who haven't a nigger to bless themselves with
since the war! No," she continued, lifting her proud little head so
promptly after Ford had recovered from his surprise as to make the ruse
of emptying her shoe perfectly palpable, "no, that's what we've both
allowed, dear, all along. And now, honey, it's near time for me to go.
Tell me something good--before I go. Tell me that you love me as you
used to--tell me how you felt that night at the ball when you first
knew we loved each other. But stop--kiss me first--there, once more--for
keeps."

CHAPTER XI.

When Uncle Ben, or "Benjamin Daubigny, Esq.," as he was already known in
the columns of the "Star," accompanied Miss Cressy McKinstry on her
way home after the first display of attention and hospitality since
his accession to wealth and position, he remained for some moments in a
state of bewildered and smiling idiocy. It was true that their meeting
was chance and accidental; it was true that Cressy had accepted his
attention with lazy amusement; it was true that she had suddenly and
audaciously left him on the borders of the McKinstry woods in a way
that might have seemed rude and abrupt to any escort less invincibly
good-humored than Uncle Ben, but none of these things marred his fatuous
felicity. It is even probable that in his gratuitous belief that his
timid attentions had been too marked and impulsive, he attributed
Cressy's flight to a maidenly coyness that pleasurably increased his
admiration for her and his confidence in himself. In his abstraction of
enjoyment and in the gathering darkness he ran against a fir-tree very
much as he had done while walking with her, and he confusedly apologized
to it as he had to her, and by her own appellation. In this way
he eventually overran his trail and found himself unexpectedly and
apologetically in the clearing before the school-house.

"Ef this ain't the singlerest thing, miss," he said, and then stopped
suddenly. A faint noise in the school-house like the sound of splintered