"I didn't know ye was so nigh, Ianthy," he whispered. "Lord! jest to think yer allers nigh an' thar cayn't nothin' separate us." The desolateness of so living a life outside his, was so terrible to the poor child who loved him, that at times she could not bear to remain in the room, but would go out into the yard and ramble about aimless and heart-broken, looking back now and then at the new, strange house, with a wild pang. "There will be nothing left if he leaves me," she said. "There will be nothing." And then she would hurry back, panting, and sit by him again, her eyes fastened upon his unconscious face, watching its every shade of expression and change. "She'll take it mighty hard," she heard Aunt Ca'line whisper one day, "ef----" And she put her hands to her ears and buried her face in the pillow, that she might not hear the rest. CHAPTER XVI. "DON'T DO NO ONE A ONJESTICE." He was not ill very long. Toward the end of the second week the house was always full of visitors who came to sympathize and inquire and prescribe, and who, in many cases, came from their farms miles away attracted by the news that "Uncle Elbert Rogers" was "mighty bad off." They came on horseback and in wagons or buggies--men in homespun, and women in sun-bonnets--and they hitched their horses at the fence and came into the house with an awkwardly subdued air, and stood in silence by the sick bed for a few minutes, and then rambled towards the hearth and talked in spectral whispers. "The old man's purty low," they always said, "he's purty low." And then they added among themselves that he had "allers bin mighty clever, an' a good neighbor." When she heard them speak of him in this manner, Louisiana knew what it meant. She never left the room again after the first day that they spoke so, and came in bodies to look at him, and turn away and say that he had been good to them. The men never spoke to her after their first nod of greeting, and the women but rarely, but they often glanced hurriedly askance at her as she sat or stood by the sick man's pillow. Somehow none of them had felt as if they were on very familiar terms with her, though they all spoke in a friendly way of her as being "a mighty purty, still, kind o' a harmless young critter." They thought, when they saw her pallor and the anguish in her eyes, that she was "takin' it powerful hard, an' no wonder," but they knew nothing of her desperate loneliness and terror. "Uncle Elbert he'll leave a plenty," they said in undertones. "She'll be well pervided fer, will Louisianny." And they watched over their charge and nursed him faithfully, feeling not a little sad themselves as they remembered his simple good nature and neighborliness and the kindly prayers for which he had been noted in "meetin'."