Dixie was shedding tears herself now, and, with a heaving breast and lowered head, she walked along beside her awed and silent companion. They had entered a wood through which the road passed, and there seemed to be a hallowed stillness in the cool, grayish touch of the coming night that pervaded the boughs and foliage of the trees. Beyond the wood a mountain-peak rose in a blaze of molten gold from the oblique rays of the setting sun, but here the night-dews were beginning to fall and the chirping insects of the dark were waking. In the marshy spots frogs were croaking and snarling, and fireflies were cutting, to their kind perhaps readable, hieroglyphics on the leafy background. Presently she wiped her eyes, and smiled up at him.
"What a goose I am!" she said. "As old as I am, I'll cry if you crook your finger at me. You went to Carlton yesterday, didn't you?"
"Yes," he replied, glad to see her emotion over, uplifting and rare as its nature was.
"Did you happen to see my young man?" A smile he failed to see in the shadows was playing sly tricks with her lineaments.
"You know who I mean. I mean my beau--Mr. Jasper Long, Esquire, merchant, cotton-handler, and rich capitalist."
"Yes, I saw him," Henley said, reluctantly. "I didn't make a point of looking him up. He ran about searching for me. I've washed my hands of that--that matter, Dixie. I ain't no hand at match-making, nohow. It ain't my turn. I get all mixed up, and blunder at it. I'll never set myself up to pick out a--a suitable mate for any woman again. There ain't none in existence--there ain't none half good enough for you, nohow. It makes me sick to--to think about a fellow like--well, no better in many ways than this here Long is--having the gall to think he--that you'd be willing to live with him the rest of your days as if there was a single thing in common betwixt you. He told me about what he done--what he _tried_ to do out at the fence when he started off the other night, and, _well_--"
"Well what?" she cried, eagerly, the corners of her mouth curving upward as she eyed him covertly.
"Why, you know well enough what the fool done, Dixie!" Henley said, unaware of the meshes into which her curiosity was leading him. "When he told me about it, in his offhand way, as if he had just done an ordinary, every-day act, I come as nigh as peas mashing his big, flathering mouth. I've been boiling mad ever since. I rolled and tumbled in bed last night, and it's stuck to me all day. Somehow I just can't shake it off."