e--the memorial service next
month."

"I told him no such thing," Henley retorted, with an effort to control
his rising temper. "I can't be responsible for the slap-dash way he puts
things. I don't like his eternal gab, nohow."

"Well, you must have said _something_," Mrs. Henley pursued, probingly.
"He never makes up things out of whole cloth. He is not that way."

"Well, I suppose I did say something," Henley reluctantly admitted. "He
was nagging the life out of me at the store about what you intended to
do, and holding me up to ridicule, and I reckon I did say that I
wouldn't be here--that my business would keep me in Texas. As for that
matter, I told you about the trip long before this queer--long before
you decided to do this--this thing."

"I know just how you said it," the woman threw back, sharply. "I know
what you've thought all along about Pa and Ma being here, and me loving
'em and caring for 'em. You do your best to hide it, but you can't."

"Well, if I do my best, what more could you expect?" Henley asked, with
more logic than patience.

"I'd want you to keep your promise to me," Mrs. Henley said, crisply,
and she bent lower over him and fixed her offended eyes on his. "You
told me before we were married that you'd promise never to object--you
even said you admired me for my feelings, and that it proved to you that
I had stability and strength of character--that you wouldn't have a wife
that would ever forget her dead husband."

"Well, I have kept my promise," Henley said. "I am not sure that I
knowed just precisely what I was doing when I made it, but I've kept it.
As for attending his--his funeral services at such a late day, that is
another thing. I don't see how you could expect it."

"You don't?" she flared up. "Will you tell me if there would be anything
to be ashamed of in your being there? Would a divine service of that
sort disgrace you? Would it besmirch your character?"

"No, and nobody said it would," Henley managed to fish from his addled
brain. "But I simply thought, somehow, that it would look better for me
to be out of the way. Funerals and the like are generally attended by
mourners, and, well, where would I come in? I reckon my proper seat
would be with you and the--the rest of the family on the front bench, if
it was anywhere. It would look funny for me just to be a looker-on from
the back part of the house, and I'd feel like a dern fool in front. A
dern fool--you may not know w