“So that’s what the matter with us, is it?” he exclaimed, approaching her with a proffered caress. “We’ve been a trifle jealous, haven’t we?” “Behave yourself, sir!” elbowing him away. “Go to Portland and see that other woman. No doubt a party by the name of Benson is expecting you.” He guffawed again, making her angrier still. “Come, Sally; let’s have no more nonsense,” he said, after his laughter had ceased, motioning her to a seat beside him on the doorway. She stood irresolute. “Very well, if you prefer to do so, you can sit a-standing, like the Dutchman’s hen. I’ve been keeping a letter that’s been burning my pocket for three days waiting for an opportunity to show it to you, Mrs. O’Dowd; but you’ve been so shy I couldn’t touch you with a forty-foot pole.” “What do you suppose I care for your letters from that other woman?” she asked, dropping into the space in the doorway, all eagerness and attention, in spite of her disclaimer. “Read it yourself, Sally. It is from my brother-in-law, Lije Robinson.” “The latest sensation is the suicide of Sam O’Dowd,” the letter went on to say, after the usual preliminaries of the border scribe. “No!” cried the widow, now such _de facto_, rising to her feet and turning deathly pale. “Sam wouldn’t commit suicide. He’d be afraid to meet his Maker.” “But he did it, Sally. Read on.” “He left a confession, saying it was remorse that drove him to it, and extolling his wife as a model woman, whom he had wronged beyond reparation in every way imaginable. “His mother is wellnigh crazy. The home the two of them had wrested from his wife and her mother, in which the old woman had allotted to spend her days, goes back to Sally now, as, by his confession, his mother has no right to it.” “Poor Sam!” cried the widow, dropping again into the proffered space in the doorway. “He had his faults, but he wasn’t all bad. This letter and his confession prove it. I shall try hard to think that he atoned for his greatest crime by his voluntary death. But I’d be sorry myself to meet the reception that he’ll get in heaven!” “Why, Sally? What do you mean?” “Nothing. Let the dead past bury its dead.” Captain Ranger, who, in first proposing matrimony, had stated earnestly that his heart was still with Annie, gazed tenderly at the weeping woman, who arose and stood before him in a mute yet beseeching attitude, while a warm love for her sprang spontaneously within him. “Come, Sally dear,” he pleaded; “sit down by me again, and let us talk it out.” She obeyed mechanically, her frame convulsed with weeping. “I can never talk again about a platonic union,” he said feelingly. “I know that Annie would sanction our marriage now if she could speak to us; and I believe with all my heart that she knows of our proposed relations, and that she will, under the peculiar circumstances, also approve.”