, much less a dead one."

"It would _seem_ that way," was all the support Wrinkle would give to
the claim, as he took up his pail and started back to the house. "I
didn't say you _was_, but Het seems to size it up that way."

Left alone, and with hot fires of resentment raging in his breast,
Henley sauntered along the fence till he was behind his barn. His change
of position brought him within a few yards of Dixie Hart's cottage, and
he suddenly heard her voice. She was speaking to some one. Peering
through the deepening darkness, which was broken only by the gleams of a
few random stars, he saw her inside her yard at the gate, and leaning on
the fence from the outside was the tall, well-clad form of Hank Bradley.

"You are not going to treat a feller as mean as that," Bradley was heard
to say, in a gruff, pleading tone, "when I've been begging you so many
times."

"I can't let you come in now, and I can't go to ride with you, either,"
Henley heard her answer, as she stood well away from the fence. "I've
got good and sufficient reasons, and I hope you won't ask me any more."

"I'll keep on asking till the crack of doom," Bradley said, in a voice
that shook. "You know I'm not the weak-kneed kind. The Bradley stock
hold on like bulldogs. When they take a notion to anything they want
it, and they keep on till they get it. So look out, Dixie Hart. I'm not
to blame; your eyes burn holes in me and set me on fire. The more you
turn me down the more I think about you."

"Well, you mustn't come any more," Dixie said, firmly. "Good-night."

Henley saw her move across the grass and vanish in the cottage. He heard
Bradley stifle a surly exclamation of disappointment, and saw him turn
and walk off slowly toward his uncle's house.

"Poor girl!" Henley said to himself. "In all her troubles she has to
ward off a dirty, designing scamp like that; but she's doing it like a
queen, an' no harm can touch 'er. And she's going to get married! She is
going into the treacherous thing absolutely blindfolded, and the Lord
only knows what will come of it. It's a risk for the best, and under the
best conditions--it may prove to be the final stroke that will knock out
her wonderful courage. God have mercy on her!"

CHAPTER VII

On the day set for Dixie's wedding Henley had occasion to go to the
little express office, adjoining the old-fashioned brick car-shed in the
village, to see about a shipment of produce which had been incorre