'm all upset, Alfred; I'll get right after a while, but things
are all crooked now. I've had trouble--I reckon a girl might call it
that and still have self-respect. I've had heaps of unexpected trouble."

"I was afraid some'n had gone wrong," Henley found himself able to say,
"not hearing any more, you see, about--about what you talked of that
day."

"I'm going to tell you, and then dismiss it," Dixie said, her pretty lip
twitching, the dark curves under her eyes lending sharp contrast to
their fathomless lustre. "I had everything ready, and went to meet him,
but he didn't come. I went to the post-office and got a letter. He
was--was taken sick--so the letter said. He was pretty bad off. In fact,
Alfred, the truth is, he's dead; the--the fellow is dead."

Her head was down; she had folded her arms on the top rail of the fence,
and she rested her brow on them. He was wondering if she was crying and
what there was for him to say, when she suddenly, and quite dry-eyed,
looked up and said: "But that must be a secret, too. Nobody knows about
it except my home folks, and nobody must. I'd give plumb up if Carrie
Wade was to flaunt that in my face and start it going over hill and
dale."

"It's too bad," Henley ventured, as nearly upon what he considered
consolation as his knowledge of her rather questionable bereavement
would justify. "What was his complaint?"

"You mean, what ailded him?" Dixie asked, an incongruous flush battling
with the pallor of her face and becoming observable even in the
starlight. "Why, you see, Alfred, I didn't get full particulars--a body
never can, you know, at a time like that--and in just a letter--but you
can depend upon it that it was sudden."

"Maybe it was what they say is so common now," Henley pursued,
awkwardly--"heart failure."

"Or weakness of the backbone." He was sure that she smiled impulsively,
for she quickly covered her mouth with her hand and lowered her head to
the fence again, and for a moment he stood staring at her and wondering
if the calamity had caused her to be hysterical. Suddenly she looked up
again and said:

"I reckon you think I ought to act different--that I ought to cry and
take on--but I can't. You must make what allowance you can. You see, I
never saw him in my life, and, well, it was just a wild-goose chase that
started in nothing and ended the same way."

"I see," Henley ventured, "but I'm sorry. Death is bad enough, in any
case, but to be called away