And Ellen Culpepper read those letters from John Barclay over and over, and curiously enough she understood them; for there is a telepathy between spirits that meet as these two children's souls had met, and in that concord words drop out and only thoughts are merchandized. Her spirit grew with his, and so "through all the world she followed him." But there came a gray dawn of a May morning when John Barclay clutched his bedfellow and whispered, "Bob, Bob--look, look." When the awakened one saw nothing, John tried to scream, but could only gasp, "Don't you see Ellen--there--there by the table?" But whatever it was that startled him fluttered away on a beam of sunrise, and Bob Hendricks rose with the frightened boy, and went to his work with him. Two days later a letter came telling him that Ellen Culpepper was dead. Now death--the vast baffling mystery of death--is Fate's strongest lever to pry men from their philosophy. And death came into this boy's life before his creed was set and hard, and in those first days while he walked far afield, he turned his face to the sky in his lonely sorrow, and when he cried to Heaven there was a silence. So his heart curdled, and you kind gentlemen of the jury who are to pass on the case of John Barclay in this story, remember that he was only twenty years old, and that in all his life there was nothing to symbolize the joy of sacrifice except this young girl. All his boyish life she had nurtured the other self in his soul,--the self that might have learned to give and be glad in the giving. And when she went, he closed his Emerson and opened his Trigonometry, and put money in his purse.[1] There came a time when Ellen Culpepper was to him as a dream. But she lived in her mother's eyes, and through all the years that followed the mother watched the little girl grow to maturity and into middle life with the other girls of her age. And even when the little headstone on the Hill slanted in sad neglect, Mrs. Culpepper's old eyes still saw Ellen growing old with her playmates. And she never saw John Barclay that she did not think of Ellen--and and what she would have made of him. And what would she have made of him? Maybe a poet, maybe a dreamer of dreams--surely not the hard, grinding, rich man that he became in this world. FOOTNOTE: