I was in some surprise, you may suppose. “But I can’t take a gentleman’s ring----” “It’s my ring, I tell you,” said Miss Jeanie. “And if you don’t take it, I shan’t believe you’re coming to see me, and I won’t give you my address--there!” What could I do? I took the ring. When I got that night to Knoxville, I wrote at once to Jerry Sullivan. If they had spent two winters in Knoxville, he might have met them, or, at least, known something about them. “KNOXVILLE, June 30, 188-- “DEAR JERRY: Tell me all you know about Miss Jeanie Bruce. “Yours, “H. HIGGINBOTHAM.” To which the answer came by telegram: “H. HIGGINBOTHAM, Knoxville: “It would take too long. “SULLIVAN.” 3. I HAD deferred my call upon Miss Bruce until I should receive Sullivan’s answer to my letter; but when his telegram came I was in a quandary. It struck me as ambiguous. And what could be the extreme haste that made a telegram advisable? Or, perhaps, was the whole thing only one of Jerry Sullivan’s jokes? Meantime I was wearing Miss Jeanie Bruce’s ring. Once it struck me that if I did not mean to call upon her, I ought to send it back. But I did mean to call upon her. There never was any question about that, from the first. I did not in the least approve of her, but I meant to call upon her, if only to tell her so. Her conversation had revealed a certain indifference to human life, but she had very soft and gentle eyes. Like the face of the boy whom Cousin Kirk had shot, they “haunted me yet.” Coe noticed my ring. Oddly enough, though a foreigner, he had got into the ways of the people quicker than I had; and I saw him looking at it one day, though he said nothing. That is, nothing of the ring; he did ask me whether I had been to see Miss Bruce. So I went; they boarded in a small frame house that belonged to a Mrs. Judge Pennoyer. I suspect it was this female justice who came to the door; it was a Monday afternoon and the house was odorous with soup; but Miss Jeanie was “very much engaged.” The Friday following she was out, and Wednesday I met her walking on the principal street of Knoxville with a tall young man. “Try Saturday,” said Coe that evening. “I want you to ask those girls for my trip up over the line.” During the summer, Coe had got some rusty rails spiked upon his right of way; and now wished to invite the youths and ladies of Tennessee to run over them in a trial trip. That day I found Miss Jeanie alone in the parlor, almost as if awaiting me. “I began to think you had forgotten us,” said she, softly. Dear me, how soft her eyes were! I said that I had called there many times.