you know."

"Well, when the time comes, I'll let you know," I added, when the buggy
stopped before my door, and I handed him the reins.

"Listen to me, my boy," he called back, as he drove off and I went up
the brown stone steps, "and take a julep."

But the support I needed was not that of whiskey, and though I swallowed
a dozen juleps, the thought of Sally's face when I broke the news would
suffer no blessed obscurity.

"Shall I tell her now, or after dinner?" I asked, while I drew out my
latch-key; and then when she met me at the head of the staircase, with
her shining eyes, I grew cowardly again, and said, "Not now--not now.
To-night I will tell her."

At night, when we sat opposite to each other, with a silver bowl of
jonquils between us, she began talking idly about the marriage of Bonny
Page, inspired, I felt, by a valiant determination to save the situation
in the eyes of the servants at least. The small yellow candle shades,
made to resemble flowers, shone like suns in a mist before my eyes; and
all the time that my thoughts worked over the approaching hour, I heard,
like a muffled undertone, the soft, regular footfalls of old Esdras, the
butler, on the velvet carpet.

"I'll tell her after the servants have gone, and the house is
quiet--when she has taken off her dinner gown--when she may turn on her
pillow and cry it out. I'll say simply, 'Sally, I am ruined. I haven't a
penny left of my own. Even the horses and the carriages and the
furniture are not mine!' No, that is a brutal way. It will be better to
put it like this"--"What did you say, dear?" I asked, speaking aloud.

"Only that Bonny Page is to have six bridesmaids, but the wedding will
be quiet, because they have lost money."

"They've lost money?"

"Everybody has lost money--everybody, the General says. Ben, do you
know," she added, "I've never cared truly about money in my heart."

In some vague woman's way she meant it, I suppose, yet as I looked at
her, where she sat beyond the bowl of jonquils, in one of her old Paris
gowns, which she had told me she was wearing out, I broke into a short,
mirthless laugh. She held her head high, with its wreath of plaits that
made a charming frame for her arched black eyebrows and her full red
mouth. On her bare throat, round and white as a marble column, there was
an old-fashioned necklace of wrought gold, which had belonged to some
ancestress, who was doubtless the belle and beauty of her generation.