"Oh, dear!" she says. "Oh, if anything should happen to Harry, why, Miss Marsh--" "Exactly," says I. We talked on a little while till I heard what I was waiting for--him coming up the street. I noticed that he hadn't been gone downtown long enough to buy a match. "I'm going over to Miss Matey's for some pie-plant," I says. "Her second crop is on. Can I go through your back gate? Maybe I'll come back this way." When I went around their house I saw that she was still standing on the porch and he was coming in the gate. And I never looked back at all--bad as I wanted to. It was deep dusk when I came back. The air was as gentle as somebody that likes you when they're liking you most. When I came by the end of the porch I heard voices, so I knew that they were talking. And then I caught just one sentence. You'd think I could have been contented to slip through the front yard and leave them to work it out. But I wasn't. In fact I'd only just got the stage set ready for what I meant to do. I walked up the steps and laid my pie-plant on the stoop. "I'm coming in," I says. They got up and said the different things usual. And I went and sat down. "You'll think in a minute," says I, "that I owe you both an apology. But I don't." "What for, dear?" Mrs. Bride says, and took my hand. I'm an old woman and I felt like their mother and their grandmother. But I felt a little frightened too. "Is either of you sick?" I says. Both of them says: "No, _I_ ain't." And both of them looked furtive and quick at the other. "Well," I says, "mebbe you don't know it. But to-day both of you has had the symptoms of coming down with something. Something serious." They looked at me, puzzled. "I noticed it in Mrs. Bride this morning," I says, "when she came over to my house. She looked white, and like all the life had gone out of her. And she didn't sing once all day, nor do any work. Then I noticed it in you to-night," I says to him, "when you walked looking down, and came acrost the street lack-luster, and like nothing mattered so much as it might have if it had mattered more. And so I done the natural thing. I told each of you about something being the matter with the other one. Something serious." I stood up in front of them, and I dunno but I felt like a fairy godmother that had something to give them--something priceless. "When two folks," I says, "speak cross to each other and can't give in, it's just as sure a disease as--as quinsy. And it'll be fatal, same as a fever can be. You can hate the sight of me if you want to, but that's why I spoke out like I done." I didn't dare look at them. I began just there to see what an awful thing I _had_ done, and how they were perfectly bound to take it. But I thought I'd get in as much as I could before they ordered me off the porch.