“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.”