ill mind which month I go to them," said Molly.
"Especially when they know the reason."

"Don't let me keep you, ma'am," said he. Molly stared at him; but he
pursued, with the same edge lurking in his slow words: "Though I'll
never forget. How could I forget any of all you have done--and been? If
there had been none of this, why, I had enough to remember! But please
don't stay, ma'am. We'll say I had a claim when yu' found me pretty well
dead, but I'm gettin' well, yu' see--right smart, too!"

"I can't understand, indeed I can't," said Molly, "why you're talking
so!"

He seemed to have certain moods when he would address her as "ma'am,"
and this she did not like, but could not prevent.

"Oh, a sick man is funny. And yu' know I'm grateful to you."

"Please say no more about that, or I shall go this afternoon. I don't
want to go. I am not ready. I think I had better read something now."

"Why, yes. That's cert'nly a good notion. Why, this is the best show
you'll ever get to give me education. Won't yu' please try that EMMA
book now, ma'am? Listening to you will be different." This was said with
softness and humility.

Uncertain--as his gravity often left her--precisely what he meant by
what he said, Molly proceeded with EMMA, slackly at first, but soon with
the enthusiasm that Miss Austen invariably gave her. She held the volume
and read away at it, commenting briefly, and then, finishing a chapter
of the sprightly classic, found her pupil slumbering peacefully. There
was no uncertainty about that.

"You couldn't be doing a healthier thing for him, deary," said Mrs.
Taylor. "If it gets to make him wakeful, try something harder." This was
the lady's scarcely sympathetic view.

But it turned out to be not obscurity in which Miss Austen sinned.

When Molly next appeared at the Virginian's threshold, he said
plaintively, "I reckon I am a dunce." And he sued for pardon. "When I
waked up," he said, "I was ashamed of myself for a plumb half-hour." Nor
could she doubt this day that he meant what he said. His mood was again
serene and gentle, and without referring to his singular words that had
distressed her, he made her feel his contrition, even in his silence.

"I am right glad you have come," he said. And as he saw her going to the
bookshelf, he continued, with diffidence: "As regyards that EMMA book,
yu' see--yu' see, the doin's and sayin's of folks like them are above
me. But I think" (he spoke most diffidently),