"Yes," said Susan, "I was thinkin' of how it is when a girl's goin' to have a child an' can't get away from it--can't--can't. She's got to go through with it--an' no one can't save her. But I suppose it made her think of her death that was comin'--her death that I b'lieve she knowed she was struck for. When I'd said it she looked like some little hunted animal dogs was after--that had run till its breath was gone an' its eyes was startin' from its head. Her little chest went up an' down with pantin'. I didn't wonder when I heard after that she'd dropped in the street in a dead faint." "Was that the day I picked her up as she lay on the pavement?" Miss Amory asked. Susan nodded, her face still hidden. Old Miss Starkweather put out her hand and laid it on the girl's shoulder. "She has had time to forget," she said, rather as if she was out of breath--"forget and grow quiet. She is dust by now--peaceful dust. Let us--my good girl--let us remember that happy story of how she died." "Yes," answered Susan, "in Italy--lying before the open window--with the sunset all rosy in the sky." But her head rested on her folded arms upon her knee, and she sobbed a low, deep sob. CHAPTER XVIII Just before the breaking out of the Civil War, Delisleville had been provided with a sensation in a piece of singularly unexpected good fortune which befell one of its most prominent citizens. It was indeed good fortune, wearing somewhat the proportions of a fairy tale, and that such things could happen in Delisleville and to a citizen who possessed its entire approval was considered vaguely to the credit of the town. One of the facts which had always been counted as an added dignity to the De Willoughbys had been their well-known possession of property in land. "Land" was always felt to be dignified, and somehow it seemed additionally so when it gained a luxuriously superfluous character by merely lying in huge, uncultivated tracts, and representing nothing but wide areas and taxes. "Them big D'Willerbys of D'lisleville owns thousands of acres as never brings 'em a cent," Mr. Stamps had said to his friends at the Cross-roads at the time Big Tom had first appeared among them. It was Mr. Stamps who had astutely suggested that the stranger was possibly "kin" to the Delisleville family, and in his discreet pursuit of knowledge he had made divers discoveries.