“Well, now, Posey,” was his greeting, as he held both her hands and smiled till his face was all a-crinkle, “if it don’t beat natur’ how you’ve growed! An’ prettier than ever, I declare! I tell you I was reel tickled when I heerd how well you was fixed, an’ that you’d found out your reel name, an’ your ma’s relations. You don’t look much like the little girl Almiry brought home with her from the Refuge.” “And that you gave the russet apples to?” Rose’s eyes were twinkling, but the tears were very near them as she recalled that day of her arrival at the Hagood home. “So I did, to be sure. Well, Posey—if you hev got another name you’ll always be Posey to me—we did hev some good times together, didn’t we?” Then they talked over the pleasant memories of their companionship, with a mutual care avoiding those whose suggestiveness might be the opposite. The only allusion he made to her leaving was, “Rover an’ me did miss you dreadfully when you went away, we just did. An’ so to-day, as I had to come over this way, I said to Rover, ‘We’ll stop an’ see Posey, we will.’ I’m glad we did, too, an’ I just believe Rover knows you.” And Rover, with his head on Rose’s knee and her hand smoothing his silky ears, gently thumped his tail on the floor, as if in affirmative. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, “I was sorry you an’ Almiry couldn’t fit together better; she meant well, Almiry did, but you know she’d never had any little girls of her own.” And as if fearful that he had cast some reflection on her memory he hastened to add, “Almiry was a wonderful woman. I tell you I met with a big loss when I lost her, I just did, an’ for a spell I was about broke up.” He paused with the query, “I s’pose you’d heard she was dead?” “Yes, but I never heard the particulars. Was she sick long?” “No; it come so onexpected it just about floored me, it did. You see she was taken with a chill, an’ she kep’ a gettin’ colder’n colder, in spite o’ everythin’ we could giv’ her, an’ do for her. Why, it did seem that what with the hot things we give her to drink, an’ the hot things we kep’ around her, that if she’d been a stone image ’twould a warmed her through; but they didn’t do a mite o’ good, not one mite. She was took early one morning, an’ late the next night I was warmin’ a flannel to lay on her. I het it so ’twas all a-smokin’, but she couldn’t feel nothin’, an’ she give it a fling, an’ riz half up in bed an’ spoke, just as natural as she ever did, ‘Elnathan Hagood, I don’t believe you’ve hed that nigh the stove; what ails you that you can’t half do a thing? I’ve a good mind to get up and heat some flannel as it ought to be done. I won’t hev any till I do.’ An’ with that she fell right back on her piller, an’ never breathed ag’in. I tell you I was all broke up.” Rose did not know what she ought to say, so she said nothing. Mr. Hagood hesitated, cleared his throat, and remarked in an inquiring tone, “Mebby you’ve heard that I was married again?”