ATTIE ALEXANDER and Charlie Durant reached home before Dolly and Hillhouse, and as Dolly alighted from the buggy at the front gate and was going up the flower-bordered walk Hattie came to the side fence and called out:

“Oh, Dolly, come here quick; I've got some 'n' to tell you.”

“Well, wait till I get my hat off,” answered Dolly.

“No, I can't wait; come on, or you 'll wish you had.”

“What is it, goosie?” Dolly smiled, as she tripped across the grass, her face flushed from her rapid drive.

“Doll, darling, I've got you in an awful scrape. I know you 'll never forgive me, but I couldn't help it. When Charlie left me at the gate mother come out and asked me all about the picnic, who was there an' who talked to who, and all about it. Among other things I told her about you and Alan getting together for such a nice, long talk, and—”

“Oh, I don't mind her,” broke in Dolly, as she reached for the skirt of her gown to rescue it from the dew on the high grass.

“Wait, wait; I'm not through by a jugful,” panted Hattie. “Just then your pa came along an' asked if you'd got home. I told him you hadn't, an' then he up and asked me if Alan Bishop was out there. I had to say yes, of course, for you know how strict mother is about telling a fib, and then what do you think he did? He come right out plain and asked if Alan talked to you by yourself. I didn't know what on earth to do. I reckon I actually turned white, and then mother chipped in and said: 'Tell the truth, daughter; a story never mends matters; besides, Colonel Barclay, you must be more reasonable; young folks will be young folks, and Alan Bishop would be my choice if I was picking out a husband for my girl.' And then you ought to have heard your pa snort; it was as loud as a horse kicking up his heels in the lot. He wheeled round an' made for the house like he was shot out of a gun.”

“I reckon he 'll raise the very Old Harry,” opined Dolly, grimly. “But I don't care; he's driven me about as far as he can.”

“I wouldn't make him any madder,” advised the innocent mischief-maker, with a doleful expression. “It's all my fault. I—”

“No, it wasn't,” declared Dolly. “But he can't run over me with his unreasonable ideas about Alan Bishop.”

With that she turned and went towards the house, her head down. On the veranda she met her mother, who was waiting for her with a pleasurable smile. “You've stirred up yore pa awful,” she said, laughing impulsively, and then trying to veil it with a seriousness that sat awkwardly on her. “You'd better dodge him right now. Oh, he's hot! He was just saying this morning that he believed you and Frank were getting on fine, and now he says Frank is an idiot to take a girl to a picnic to meet his rival. How did it happen?”

“Just as I intended it should, mother,” Dolly said. “I knew he was coming, and sent Frank off after a watermelon. He didn't have sense enough to see through my ruse. If I'd treated Alan that way he'd simply have looked straight through me as if I'd been a window-pane. Mother, I'm not going to put up with it. I tell you I won't. I know what there is in Alan Bishop better than father does, and I am not going to stand it.”

“You ain't, heigh?” thundered Barclay across the hall, and he stalked out of the sitting-room, looking over his eye-glasses, a newspaper in his hand. “Now, my lady, let me say to you that Alan Bishop shall never darken my door, and if you meet him again anywhere you shall go away and stay.”

“Father “—Dolly had never stood so tall in her high-heeled shoes nor so straight—“Father, you insulted Alan just now before Mrs. Alexander and Hattie, and I'm not going to have you do it any more. I love him, and I shall never love any other man, nor marry any other man. I know he loves me, and I'm going to stick to him.”

“Then the quicker you get away from here the better,” said the old man, beside himself with rage. “And when you go, don't you dare to come back again.”

The Colonel stalked from the room. Dolly glanced at her mother, who had a pale smile of half-frightened enjoyment on her face.

“I think you said 'most too much,” Mrs. Barclay said. “You'd better not drive him too far.”

Dolly went up to her room, and when supper was called, half an hour later, she declined to come down. However, Mrs. Barclay sent up a tray of delicacies by Aunt Milly, the old colored woman, which came back untouched.

It was the custom of the family to retire rather early at that season of the year, and by half-past nine the house was dark and still. Mrs. Barclay dropped to sleep quickly, but waked about one o' clock, and lay unable to drift into unconsciousness again for the delightful pastime of thinking over her daughter's love affair. She began to wonder if Dolly, too, might not be awake, and the prospect of a midnight chat on that of all topics made her pulse beat quickly. Slipping noiselessly out of bed, so as not to wake her husband, who was snoring in his bed across the room, she glided up-stairs. She had not been there a moment before the Colonel was waked by a low scream from her, and then he heard her bare feet thumping on the floor overhead as she crossed the hall into the other rooms. She screamed out again, and the Colonel sprang up, grasped his revolver, which always lay on the bureau, and ran into the hall. There he met his wife, half sliding down the stairs.

“Dolly's gone,” she gasped. “Her bed hasn't been touched. Oh, Seth, do you reckon anything has happened to her?”

The old man stared in the dim light of the hall, and then turned towards the door which opened on the back veranda. He said not a word, but was breathing hard. The cabin of old Ned and his wife, Aunt Milly, was near by.

“Ned; oh, Ned!” called out the Colonel.

“Yes, marster!”

“Crawl out o' that bed and come heer!”

“Yes, marster; I'm a-comin'.”

“Oh, Seth, do you reckon—do you—?”

“Dry up, will you?” thundered Barclay. “Are you comin', Ned?”

Uncle Ned's gray head was thrust out at the partly open door.

“You want me, marster?”

“Yes; what do you suppose I called you for if I didn't want you. Now I don't want any lies from you. You know you can't fool me. I want to know if you carried a note from this house to anybody since sundown.”

“A note must have been sent,” ventured Mrs. Barclay, in an undertone. “Dolly never would have gone to him. He must have been notified and come after her.”

“Dry up, for God's sake!” yelled the Colonel over his shoulder to the spectre by his side. “Answer me, you black rascal.”

“Marse Seth, young miss, she—”

“She sent a note to Alan Bishop, didn't she?” interpolated the Colonel.

“Marster, I didn't know it was any harm. I des 'lowed it was some prank o' young miss'. Oh, Lordy!”

“You might know you'd do suppen, you old sap-haid,” broke in Aunt Milly from the darkness of the cabin. “I kin count on you ever' time.”

“Get back in bed,” ordered the Colonel, and he walked calmly into his room and lay down again. His wife followed him, standing in the middle of the room.

“Aren't you going to do anything?” she said. Her voice was charged with a blending of tears and a sort of feminine eagerness that is beyond the comprehension of man.

“Do anything? What do you think I ought to do? Raise an alarm, ring the church-bells, and call out the hook-and-ladder company? Huh! She's made her bed; let her lie on it.”

“You are heartless—you have no feeling,” cried his wife. The very core of her desire was to get him to talk about the matter. If he was not going to rouse the neighborhood, and thus furnish some one to talk to, he, at least, ought to be communicative.

“Well, you'd better go to bed,” snarled her husband.

“No”—she scratched a match and lighted a candle—“I'm going up-stairs and see if she left a note. Now, you see, I had to think of that. The poor girl may have written something.”

There did seem to be a vestige of reason in this, and the old man said nothing against it, throwing himself back on his pillow with a stifled groan.

After about half an hour Mrs. Barclay came back; she stood over him, holding the candle so that its best rays would fall on his face.

“She didn't write one word,” was her announcement. “I reckon she knew we'd understand or find out from Uncle Ned. And just to think!”—Mrs. Barclay now sat down on a chair across the back of which lay the Colonel's trousers, holding the candle well to the right that she might still see the rigid torture of his face—“just to think, she's only taken the dress she had on at the picnic. It will be a poor wedding for her, when she's always said she wanted a lot of bridesmaids and ushers and decorations. Poor child! Maybe they had to drive into the country to get somebody to marry them. I know brother Lapsley wouldn't do it without letting us know. I reckon she 'll send the first thing in the morning for her trunk, if—” Mrs. Barclay gazed more steadily—“if she don't come herself.”

“Well, she needn't come herself,” grunted the reclining figure as it flounced under the sheets to turn its face to the wall.

“You wouldn't be that hard on our only child, just because she—”

“If you don't go to bed,” the words rebounded from the white plastering an inch from the speaker's lips, “you 'n' me 'll have a row. I've said what I'd do, and I shall do it!”

“Well, I'm going out to speak to Aunt Milly a minute,” said Mrs. Barclay, and, drawing on a thin graywrapper and sliding her bare feet into a pair of slippers, she shuffled out to the back porch.

“Come here, Aunt Milly,” she called out, and she sat down on the highest step and waited till the fat old woman, enveloped in a coarse gray blanket, joined her.

“Aunt Milly, did you ever hear the like?” she said. “She 'ain't made off sho 'nough, have she, Miss Annie?”

“Yes, she's gone an' done it; her pa drove her just a little too far. I reckon she railly does love Alan Bishop, or thinks she does.”

“I could take a stick an' baste the life out'n Ned,” growled the black woman, leaning against the veranda post; she knew better than to sit down in the presence of her mistress, even if her mistress had invited her to talk.

“Oh, he didn't know any better,” said Mrs. Barclay. “He always would trot his legs off for Dolly, and”—Mrs. Barclay's tone was tentative—“it wouldn't surprise me if Alan Bishop paid him to help to-night.”

“No, he didn't help, Miss Annie. Ned's been in bed ever since he come back fum town des atter supper. He tol' me des now dat de young man was in a room at de hotel playin' cyards wid some more boys an' he got up an' writ Miss Dolly er note; but Ned went straight to bed when he got home.”

“Then, Alan must have got her to meet him at the front gate, don't you reckon? He didn't drive up to the house either, for I think I would have heard the wheels. He must have left his turn-out at the corner.”

“Are you a-goin' to set there all night?” thundered the Colonel from his bed. “How do you expect anybody to sleep with that low mumbling going on, like a couple of dogs under the house?”

Mrs. Barclay got up, with a soft, startled giggle.

“He can' t sleep because he's bothered,” she said, in a confidential undertone. “We'd better go in. I don't want to nag him too far; it's going hard with Dolly as it is. I'm curious to see if he really will refuse to let her come back. Do you reckon he will, Milly?”

“I sw'ar I don't know, Miss Annie,” replied the dark human shape from the depths of her blanket. “He sho is a caution, an' you kin see he's tormented. I 'll bet Ned won't have a whole skin in de mornin'.”

The Colonel, despite his sullen effort to conceal the fact from his wide-awake wife, slept very little during the remainder of that night, and when he rose at the usual hour he went out to see his horse fed.

Mrs. Barclay was fluttering from the dining-room to the kitchen, gossiping with the cook, who had run out of anything to say on the subject and could only grunt, “Yes'um, and no'um,” according to the reply she felt was expected. Aunt Milly was taking a plate of waffles into the dining-room when a little negro boy, about five years of age, the son of the cook at the Alexanders', crawled through a hole in the fence between the two houses and sauntered towards the kitchen. On the door-step he espied a black kitten that took his fancy and he caught it and began to stroke it with his little black hand.

“What you want now?” Aunt Milly hovered over him like an angry hen. “Want ter borrow suppen, I boun' you; yo'-alls folks is de beatenes' people ter borrow I ever lived alongst.”

The boy seemed to have forgotten his errand in his admiration for the kitten.

“What you atter now?” snarled Aunt Milly, “eggs, flour, sugar, salt, pepper, flat-iron? Huh, we-all ain't keepin' er sto'.”

The boy looked up suddenly and drew his ideas together with a jerk. “Miss Dolly, she say sen 'er Mother Hubbub wrappin' dress, hangin' on de foot er her bed-post.”

“What?” gasped Aunt Milly, and, hearing the exclamation, Mrs. Barclay came to the door and paused to listen.

“Miss Dolly,” repeated the boy, “she say sen 'er 'er wrappin' dress off'n de foot-post er 'er bed; en, en, she say keep 'er two waffles hot en, en dry—not sobby—en ter git 'er dat fresh cream fer 'er coffee in 'er lill pitcher whut she lef' in de ice-box.”

“Dolly? Dolly?” cried Mrs. Barclay. “You are surely mistaken, Pete. Where did you see her?”

“Over 't we-all's house,” said the boy, grabbing the kitten which had slid from his momentarily inattentive fingers.

“Over 't yo'-all's house!” cried Milly, almost in a tone of horror, “en, en is her husban' wid 'er?”

The boy grinned contemptuously.

“Huh, Miss Dolly ain't no married ooman—you know she ain't, huh! I seh, married! Look heer”—to the kitten—“don't you scratch me, boy!”

Mrs. Barclay bent over him greatly excited. “What was she doing over at your house, Pete?”

“Nothin' w'en I seed 'er 'cep'jest her en Miss Hattie lyin' in de bed laughin' en car'yin' on.”

“Oh, Lordy!” Mrs. Barclay's eyes were riveted on Aunt Milly's beaming face, “do you reckon—?”

“She's slep 'over dar many times before now, Miss Annie,” said Aunt Milly, and she burst into a round, ringing laugh, her fat body shaking like a mass of jelly. “She done it time en ergin—time en ergin.”

“Well, ain't that a purty mess?” said Mrs. Barclay, almost in a tone of disappointment. “I 'll get the wrapper, Pete, and you tell her to put it on and hurry over here as soon as she possibly can.”

A few minutes later Dolly came from the Alexander's and met her mother at the gate. “Oh, Dolly,” Mrs. Barclay cried, “you've got us in an awful mess. We missed you about midnight and we thought—your father made Ned acknowledge that he took a note to Alan Bishop from you, and we thought you had gone off to get married. Your father's in an awful temper, swearing you shall never—”

Dolly tossed her head angrily. “Well, you needn't say I got you into it; you did it yourselves and I don't care how much you suffer. I say! When I go to get married it will not be that way, you can depend on it. Now, I reckon, it will be all over town that—”

“No, it needn't get out of the family,” Mrs. Barclay assured her, in a guilty tone of apology. “Your pa wouldn't let me raise any alarm. But you did send a note to Alan Bishop, Dolly.”

“Yes, I knew he was in town, and would be here to-day, and I simply wrote him that father was angry at our seeing each other again and that I hoped he would avoid meeting him just now—that was all.”

“Well, well, well.” Mrs. Barclay hurried through the house and out to where Barclay stood at the lot fence watching Ned curry his horse.

“What do you reckon?” she gasped. “Dolly didn't go off at all; she just went to spend the night with Hattie Alexander.”

His face changed its expression against his will; the blood flowed into the pallor and a satisfied gleam shot from his half-closed eyes. He turned from her, looking over the fence at the horse.

“You're leavin' a splotch on that right hind leg,” he said. “Are you stone blind?”

“I was gittin' roun' to it, marster,” said the negro, looking his surprise over such an unexpected reproof. “No; she just wrote Alan that you was displeased at them getting together yesterday and advised him to dodge you to-day while he is in town.”

“Well, he'd better!” said the Colonel, gruffly, as they walked towards the house. “You tell her,” he enjoined—“you tell her what I said when I thought she was gone. It will be a lesson to her. She can tell now how I 'll do if she does go against me in this matter.”

“I reckon you are glad she didn't run off,” replied his wife thoughtfully. “The Lord only knows what you'd do about writing your letters without her help. I believe she knows more about your business right now than you do, and has a longer head. You'd' a' saved a thousand dollars by taking her advice the other day about that cotton sale.”