“The night you went away I was standing down by the gate under the old elm. I had on my best things yet from the wedding, and I hated to go in and have the day over and have to begin putting on my old calico to-morrow morning again, and washing dishes just the same. Seemed as if I couldn’t bear to have the world just the same now you was gone away. Well, I heard someone coming down the street, and who do you think it was? Why, Hanford Weston. He came right up to the gate and stopped. I don’t know’s he ever spoke two words to me in my life except that time he stopped the big boys from snow-balling me and told me to run along quick and git in the school-house while he fit ’em. Well, he stopped and spoke, and he looked so sad, seemed like I knew just what he was feeling sad about, and I told him all about you getting married instead of your sister. He looked at me like he couldn’t move for a while and his face was as white as that marble man in the cemetery over Squire Hancock’s grave. He grabbed the gate real hard and I thought he was going to fall. He couldn’t even move his lips for a while. I felt just awful sorry for him. Something came in my throat like a big stone and my eyes got all blurred with the moonlight. He looked real handsome. I just couldn’t help thinking you ought to see him. Bimeby he got his voice back again, and we talked a lot about you. He told me how he used to watch you when you was a little girl wearing pantalettes. You used to sit in the church pew across from his father’s and he could just see your big eyes over the top of the door. He says he always thought to himself he would marry you when he grew up. Then when you began to go to school and was so bright he tried hard to study and keep up just to have you think him good enough for you. He owned up he was a bad speller and he’d tried his level best to do better but it didn’t seem to come natural, and he thought maybe ef he was a good farmer you wouldn’t mind about the spelling. He hired out to his father for the summer and he was trying with all his might to get to be the kind of man t’would suit you, and then when he was plowing and planning all what kind of a house with big columns to the front he would build here comes the coach driving by and _you_ in it! He said he thought the sky and fields was all mixed up and his heart was going out of him. He couldn’t work any more and he started out after supper to see what it all meant.