H ENLEY did not see Dixie Hart till a week had elapsed. He had started to drive over to Carlton one morning, when he passed her as she was mending a rail-fence round one of her fields which extended down to the road. She had on a sunbonnet and heavy gloves, and stood in a dense patch of prickly blackberry briers which reached to her shoulders.

"That work's too hard for you," Henley greeted her cordially. "I've done all sorts of jobs on a farm, from splitting rails to feeding a steam thresher, and they are picnics beside what you are now at."

"I believe you are right," she smiled, as she pushed back her bonnet and exposed her red face and neck. "But I had to do it; the pigs have rooted away the rotten rails next to the ground under these briers and got in to my turnips and potatoes. But I've nearly finished, thank goodness."

"I'm off for Carlton," he informed her. "I go every day or so now on business. Is there anything I can do for you over there?"

"There really is, Alfred." She parted the clinging briers and came quite close to him in one of the fence corners which was infested with the wild growth. She had drawn off her gloves, and now thrust a pink hand into her pocket and got out a handkerchief, in a corner of which were tied some coins. "I want you to step into the book-store and get me a Second Reader—the sort they use in the public schools over there. It's for little Joe. I'm learning him to read, and he's doing it as fast as a dog can trot."

"I wish you'd let me pay for the book," Henley ventured, as she put the money into his hand. "You know I've got twenty-five dollars of your cash, anyway. That old cage wasn't worth anything."

"You mean I've got twenty-five dollars of your money," she retorted. "Why, I've been ashamed to look you in the face. I didn't act right about it, and I hardly know why I done it. As a friend to you I ought to have told you about the chance I saw and not set in to gain myself. I don't feel right about it. I'd rather you'd have it—I can't feel like it's mine. You'd made money out of all the other things, and you ought to have made a clean sweep of the whole job."

"You are forgetting two main things," he said, gravely, his eyes averted. "You forget that you paid me all I asked for the blame thing, and that if it hadn't been for you I'd not have been at the sale of the circus, anyway."

"You mean—" She flushed knowingly, and avoided his earnest gaze.

"That you stopped me that night, and kept me from doing the biggest fool thing a sensible man ever was guilty of. I've thanked you in my heart, Dixie, thousands and thousands of times. It would have ruined me for life, but you looked ahead and saw it and saved me."

"Oh, well, that's past and gone," Dixie said, touched by a certain new and deep quality in his voice. "I'll keep the money if you want me to. I really need it. Old Welborne got hopping mad at me for ousting his tenant, and simply rowed me up Salt River. Some day I may come to you for legal advice. I want you to look over the document he got me to sign. I want to know more about it than I do. There are too many 'aforesaids' and 'herebys' in it to suit me. I bought that farm with my eyes shut. I was so anxious to own land that I was willing to take the property on any terms. Welborne is getting to be like that old man in the fairy-book that stuck to the feller's neck and never could be shook off till he was made drunk. Welborne never touches a drop, you know, and so he'll stick till death claims him. I'm in an awful mess. I work like a slave from break of day till away after dark, and never seem to move a peg toward any sort of landing-place."

"You really ought to marry," Henley said. "That's exactly what you ought to do. There's many a good man in the world that is actually suffering for the need of the right sort of a helpmeet."

"You hit the nail on the head that whack," she said, quite seriously. "I know I'm better-looking now—when I'm fixed up, at least—than I will be ten years later; and I've got sense enough to know that old maids don't make natural-looking brides. No, I really ought to give the subject more thought. I ain't acting in a businesslike way about it. I ought to put myself on the market, but I let first one thing and then another interfere, and now it seems to be little Joe. I think I've got a sort of mother-love for him, Alfred. He works over in his field, and me in mine, and when it's twelve o'clock I get out my dinner-bucket and call to him, and we both go down to the spring and have a picnic. That's where I learn him to read. If old Pitman was to get on to it I reckon he'd raise a row. Joe fetches his pore little scraps of streak-o'-lean, streak-o'-fat bacon an' hoe-cake along, but I make 'im throw the stuff away. I don't know, but I believe I'd rather see that child's big, hungry eyes as I open that bucket than to be admired by the handsomest young man in the county. I don't know, though—I've never tried the young-man part."

"Yes, you ought to marry, Dixie." Henley, with the true feeling of a gentleman that he ought not to sit while she stood, got out of his buggy and leaned on the fence. "I'm going to confess that I've thought a lot about that very thing since I got home, and, if I'm the judge I think I am, I believe I've run across the very man for you."

"You don't say!" Dixie cried, eagerly. "Well, well!"

"You know I drive over to Carlton every now and then," Henley went on, "and as Jim always has a few pounds of butter, a box or so of eggs, and the like, to send, I take 'em to a store run by a young feller that I always did like. Jasper Long is his name. He got his start by the hardest licks that was ever dealt by a poor boy. He was a half-orphan, and had to take care of his old mother till she died and left him all alone. He drove a dray about town till he was twenty, and with money he'd saved he set up for himself in business. He's the wonder of the town now, for he made money hand over fist. He's hitched on a brick warehouse to his shebang, and buys cotton when it reaches its lowest ebb and holds it till it gets to the top—then he lets loose. Me and him are pretty thick, and when I go over there either I have to eat with him at the hotel or he does with me. Sometimes we toss up head-or-tails to see who pays."

"I've never seen him," Dixie said, quite interested, "but I've heard about him. Carrie Wade said he come out to camp-meeting one Sunday, and was pointed out as a big catch, but she said he was sort of clumsy and awkward in his movements."

"Carrie wouldn't think his gait was so bad if he was trotting at her side," commented Henley. "But Long's all right; he's honest, and straight as a shingle. I'd trust him to act square in any deal, and that's a lot to say these times. He ain't had much to do with women. You see, they've got a sort of stuck-up society crowd over there that don't think he's quite the thing, and so he's out of what you might call the elyte. His sort are the kind that always count in any struggle, though. He bunks in a big, wide bed in the back end of his store, and one night when I had to lie over there because the river was out o' banks he made me sleep with him. That was the time I advised him to marry. It pleased him powerful, and he up and told me that he'd been giving the matter considerable thought and investigation. He said that every now and then it would occur to him that precious time was passing, but that he'd been so busy he'd not had time to go at it right. He said that most of the women on any list of the kind he'd seen was fussy and looked lazy and thriftless. Then he come right out and asked me if I happened to know a suitable candidate, and—well, Dixie, I couldn't hold in. I talked as earnest as a preacher at a ranting revival. I had his eye and I helt it clean through. I described you to him and—"

"You did?" Dixie laid an eager hand on his arm and laughed merrily, "What did you say? Tell me exactly. I won't let you leave till you do. Tell me, Alfred."

"Oh, I couldn't do that, Dixie!" Henley flushed to his hat. "I'd make a botch of it. I could talk to him, but I couldn't to you—at least—at least not on that line."

"But you've got to do it!" the girl insisted. "I want to hear it. I've always wanted to know what a man would say about me behind my back. I know what women will say, for they will tell you to your teeth exactly what they will behind your back, only worse, if they can possibly do it. Try to remember exactly what you said."

Henley's blood burned fiercely in his tanned face. "I couldn't tell you like I did him, and I hain't going to try. I ain't made that way—some men are, but I ain't."

"You are afraid I'll feel bad about it, I see," the girl said, with well-assumed severity, and she glanced aside that he might not read the look of conscious power in her eyes. "You and me have been such stanch friends that you hate to tell me what a poor opinion you have of me and my looks. I see. I see. Well, I hain't got no right to think anybody would think well of me—you least of all."

"Shucks! If you'd heard me you'd never complain," Henley burst forth. "I told him you was the prettiest thing that ever wore shoe-leather; that you had hair of a reddish-brownish mixture that no man could begin to describe, and eyes so big and deep and drawing-like that a feller couldn't look in 'em without wondering what they was made of, and cheeks and lips as red and ripe and laughing as—"

"That will do," Dixie laughed, pleasurably. "You was determined to trade me off, and you went at it like I was a horse you was trying to get rid of for more than he was worth. Well, what else did you say?"

"Why, I told 'im about your awful struggle against adversity; about the hold old Welborne had on you; about your mother and aunt being helpless on your hands, and about how you wanted to add to it all by helping Pitman's bound boy. But when I told him the other day about the way you bought and sold that lion's cage I thought he would bust wide open. He throwed himself back agin the counter and yelled and clapped his hands. Said he:

"'Alf, that's the woman for me. Every trading man, needs a partner like her. Such women as her are the mothers of kings and presidents and great geniuses. My mother was that way; she made me what I am.' And then he railed out against conditions that could make you undergo so much hardship, and said he'd just love to give a girl like you a good home that you could keep neat and clean and in apple-pie order. He said his life was lonely, and that he wanted to see a smiling face at the window when he got home after work. He says he's able to build as good a house as any man in Carlton, and that he already owns a corner lot on Tilbury Avenue, the swell street of the town. The truth is, he wants to take a look at you powerful bad, and I promised him, if it was possible, that I would—"

"Well, I don't know about that," Dixie objected suddenly, and her pretty brow wrinkled. "You know what they say about a burnt child. I've already as good as offered myself to one chap. I didn't come up to requirements, and I don't want to do it again. What you'd say to him about me and what he'd actually think are two different things. If I was to meet him and I saw from his looks that he didn't think much of your judgment I'd hate you both and feel like scratching your eyes out. I'd make a sensible man a good wife, and I'd do my part; but I'll be hanged if I'll walk up to him wearing a 'For Sale' tag. What you say is mighty interesting, and I may let it bother me a good deal, for a woman owes it to herself to look out for number one, but there is a line of self-respect that a woman can't cross. I'm in an awful mess, and I'd marry to get out of it. You may say what you please about me to him, but that's as far as I'll go."

"You don't think you could send the poor chap some word or other?" Henley ventured, at the end of his diplomacy, as he got into his buggy and took up the reins.

"No, I don't," was the thoughtful answer. "He's a friend of yours, and you recommend him high enough, but we hain't been introduced, and to take any step beforehand on my side would be unbecoming of a lady, and that's what I am."

"Yes—of course, and you know best," said Henley, as he clucked to his horse, "but Long will be powerfully disappointed. He's got sort of keyed up over this thing, and it has gone and unsettled him. I reckon he's got a pretty picture of you in his mind, and keeps it before him all the time."

"That's it," said Dixie. "And I wouldn't like to see it turn to a chromo on his hands. I know what I look like to myself, but I wouldn't expect to suit every taste."