ort of a job for you to do.' And
then he turned around to the old Squire and says, 'Send for Milly.'

"When we all heard that Milly'd been sent for, the first thing we
thought was, 'How on earth is Milly goin' to tell Richard all he's
got to know?' I never used to think we was anything over and above the
ordinary out in our neighborhood, but when I ricollect that Richard
Elrod come up from a boy to a man without knowin' who his father was,
it seems like we must 'a' known how to hold our tongues anyhow. There
wasn't man, woman, or child that ever hinted to Milly Baker's boy that
he wasn't like other children, and so it was natural for us to wonder
how Milly was goin' to tell him. Well, it wasn't any of our business,
and we never found out. All we ever did know was that Milly and
Richard walked over to the big house together, and Richard held his
head as high as ever.

"They said that Dick give a start when Milly come into the room. I
reckon he expected to see the same little girl he'd fooled twenty
years back, and when she come walkin' in it jest took him by surprise.

"'Why, Milly,' says he, 'is this you?'

"And he held out his hand, and she walked over to the bed and laid her
hand in his. Folks that was there say it was a strange sight for any
one that remembered what them two used to be. Her so gentle and
sweet-lookin', and him all wore out with bad livin' and wasted to a
shadder of what he used to be.

"I've seen the same thing, child, over and over again. Two people'll
start out together, and after a while they'll git separated, or,
maybe, they'll live together a lifetime, and when they git to the end
o' fifteen or twenty or twenty-five years, one'll be jest where he was
when they set out, and the other'll be 'way up and 'way on, and
they're jest nothin' but strangers after all. That's the way it was
with Milly and Dick. They'd been sweethearts, and there was the child;
but the father'd gone his way and the mother'd gone hers, and now
there was somethin' between 'em like that 'great gulf' the Bible tells
about. Well, they said Dick looked up at Milly like a hungry man looks
at bread, and at last he says:

"'I'm goin' to make an honest woman of you, Milly.'

"And Milly looked him in the eyes and said as gentle and easy as if
she'd been talkin' to a sick child: 'I've always been an honest woman,
Dick.'

"This kind o' took him back again, but he says, right earnest and
pitiful, 'I want to marry you, Milly; do