kyars. He 'lowed
the compn'y mought want them papers whenst they went into liquidation,
ez he called it, an' tole me how he hed hid 'em."

Rufe Kinnicutt wondered that she should have been so unyielding. She did
not speculate on the significance of her promise. She did not appraise
its relative value with other interests, and seek to qualify it. Once
given she simply kept it. She held herself no free agent. It was not
hers.

The discovery that the lure was gold revealed the incentive of her
lover's jealous demand to share the custody of the secret. His intention
was substituted for the deed in her rigid interpretation of integrity.
It cost her many tears. But she seemed thereafter to him still more
unyielding, as erect, fragile, ethereally pure and pale she noted his
passing no more than the lily might. He often thought of the cheap lure
of the sophisms that had so deluded him, the simple obvious significance
of the letter, and the phrase, "Good-bye, Chilhowee Lily," had also an
echo of finality for him.

THE PHANTOM OF BOGUE HOLAUBA

Gordon never forgot the sensation he experienced on first beholding it.
There was no mist in the midnight. The moon was large and low. The
darkness of the dense, towering forests on either hand impinged in no
wise on the melancholy realm of wan light in which the Mississippi lay,
unshadowed, solitary, silent as always, its channel here a mile or more
in breadth.

He had been observing how the mighty water-course was sending out its
currents into a bayou, called Bogue Holauba, as if the larger stream
were a tributary of the lesser. This peculiarity of the river in the
deltaic region, to throw off volume instead of continually receiving
affluents, was unaccustomed to him, being a stranger to the locality,
and for a moment it focussed his interest. The next, his every faculty
was concentrated on a singular phenomenon on the bank of the bogue.

He caught his breath with a gasp; then, without conscious volition, he
sought to explain it to his own shocked senses, to realize it as some
illusion, some combination of natural causes, the hour, the pallor
pervading the air, the distance, for his boat was near the middle of the
stream,--but the definiteness of the vision annulled his efforts.

There on the broad, low margin, distinct, yet with a coercive conviction
of unreality, the figure of a man drawn in lines of vague light paced
slowly to and fro; an old man, he would have said,