"I know it's wrong of me," she says, begging-like. "Mebby it is and mebby it ain't," I says. "But what is it?" "But you never wrote to me," she says. "You never wrote to me," I says, not wanting her to get the best of me, whatever it was she might be talking about. "And then HE came to town!--" "Who?" I asts her. "Don't you know?" she says. "The man I am going to marry." When she said that I felt, all of a sudden, like when you are broke and hungry and run acrost a half dollar you had forgot about in your other pants. I was so glad I jumped. "Great guns!" I says. I had never really knowed what being glad was before. "Oh, Danny, Danny," she says, putting her hands in front of her face, "and here you have come to claim me for your bride!" Which showed me why she had looked so scared. That there girl had went and got engaged to another feller. And had been laying awake nights suffering fur fear I would turn up agin. And now I had. Looey, he always said never to trust a woman! "Martha," I says, "you ain't acted right with me." "Oh, Danny, Danny," she says, "I know it! I know it!" "Some fellers in my place," I says, "would raise a dickens of a row." "I DID love you once," she says, looking at me from between her fingers. "Yes," says I, acting real melancholy, "you did. And now you've quit it, they don't seem to me to be nothing left to live fur." Martha, she was an awful romanceful girl. I got the notion that mebby she was enjoying her own remorsefulness a little bit. I fetched a deep sigh and I says: "Some fellers would kill theirselves on the spot!" "Oh!--Oh!--Oh!--" says Martha. "But, Martha," says I, "I ain't that mean. I ain't going to do that." That dern girl ackshellay give me a disappointed look! If anything, she was jest a bit TOO romanceful, Martha was. "No," says I, cheering up a little, "I am going to do something they ain't many fellers would do, Martha. I'm going to forgive you. Free and fair and open. And give you back my half of that ring, and--" Dern it! I had forgot I had lost that half of that there ring! I remembered so quick it stopped me. "You always kept it, Danny?" she asts me, very soft-spoken, so as not to give pain to one so faithful and so noble as what I was. "Let me see it, Danny." I made like I was feeling through all my pockets fur it. But that couldn't last forever. I run out of pockets purty soon. And her face begun to show she was smelling a rat. Finally I says: "These ain't my other clothes--it must be in them." "Danny," she says, "I believe you LOST it." "Martha," I says, taking a chancet, "you know you lost YOUR half!" She owns up she has lost it a long while ago. And when she lost it, she says, she knowed that was fate and that our love was omened in under an evil star. And who was she, she says, to struggle agin fate? "Martha," I says, "I'll be honest with you. Fate got away with my half too one day when I didn't know they was crooks like her sticking around."