as a bat in daytime."

"Then I've heard," the girl pursued, "that he neglected her and finally
went off West with Hank Bradley, and almost quit writing to her."

"Yes," Henley nodded, "and she moped about home as pale as a dead
person, and never seemed interested in anything that was going on. All
that didn't do me any good, I'm here to tell you. Her trouble become
mine. I toted it night and day. I wasn't fit for work. I was as nigh
crazy as a man could well be out of an asylum."

"Then the news come back that he was dead?" The girl leaned on the fence
and looked down.

"Yes; Hank Bradley come home, and told how Dick was blowed away in the
awful tornado that destroyed that new town in Oklahoma. Hank had helped
hunt for his body; but it never could be identified among the hundreds
that was picked up, and so his remains never was brought home. That one
fact nearly killed Hettie. I'm talking plain, Dixie, but me and you are
good, true friends, and I want you, anyway, to understand my fix. I used
to watch her taking walks all by herself in the woods, always in her
thick, black veil, and bowed over like, as if she was under a heavy
load. I reckon no woman the Lord ever constructed is quite as attractive
to the eye uncovered as she is partly hid, for we are always hunting for
perfection, and so nothing under the sun seemed to me to be so good and
pure and desirable as Hettie did. I even gloried in the attention she
paid his mammy and daddy. I thought it was fine and noble, and that it
gave the lie to the charge that women are changeable. I don't want you
to think that I rate her any lower now, either, Dixie, for I don't.
She's a sight better woman than I am a man, and I certainly dogged the
life out of her till she agreed to marry me. She told me fair and square
at the start that she'd always love him, and I told her that it wouldn't
matter a bit. It hurts my pride a little now, but that ain't her
lookout. Folks say she's odd and peculiar, and that may be so, too, but
she was that way all along, and it's a waste of time to criticise
anybody for what they can't help."

"I've always liked her," the girl said. "She certainly attends to her
own business, and that is more than I can say for my chief enemy, Carrie
Wade. Alfred, that girl hates the ground I walk on, and yet she keeps
coming to see me. She has me on her visiting list so she can devil me.
She has no work to do at home, and so she comes over to nag me. She
never