"Then you haven't the diplomacy of a true Kentucky gentleman. I'll tell you what one of the most true and gallant of them once told me, and he would be an example for you to follow--in more than one particular. He was over ninety years old, and smoking a pipe--a dear old pipe he was seldom without--when I came up to him. Holding it toward me, he said: 'I shall not ask if I may smoke in your presence! A long time ago that request once met with a denial, so thereafter I merely implored the ladies' permission to burn a little incense to their lovely charms. Nor do I recall,' he smiled, 'one single refusal in the seventy-five years which have passed since then!' This," Jane added, her voice tender with the memory, "was General Simon Bolivar Buckner." "Well, you've cut a notch too high for me," he answered seriously. "Those few 'fine things' you just accused me of are nothing more than fireflies flashing in a skull compared to that grand old man. How d'you like the simile, by the way? Pretty good, isn't it?" "A striking picture of you, Brent! I would recognize it anywhere!" A ripple of good humor played about her mouth which made her dangerously attractive, and, oddly enough, this was caused by that look of seriousness she had seen in him--a look which she had not the slightest doubt portrayed some mental suffering. To anyone else she would have held out her hand and said: "Let me help--I know I can!" But now she could only feel somehow glad to find that he was big enough, and fine enough to suffer. She had not suspected it, and it threw a new light about him. It sent, too, a riot of something pleasant tingling through her blood--as she had felt sometimes at the lookout point above her father's cabin, where she watched for spies while he "mashed" the corn, and the white moonshine dripped, dripped from the rusty worm of his home-made still; when, crouched beneath the stars, her quick ears had caught some faint, suspicious sounds. Ruinous though they might turn out to be, she used to love those tingle-giving sounds. The same sort of thrill now reached past the culture-clothed sentinels around her heart and gave it an honest shake for old time's sake. Slowly she began to smile, and, seeing this, he moodily asked: "Why are you smiling?" "I don't know, Brent. I just want to smile, that's all." Then she arose, murmured good night, and went out. But the branches were still swaying where she had passed when he heard a quick cry of surprise. "Brent!" He was beside her in a second, looking over her outstretched arm that pointed toward the thickest portion of the grounds. "What is it?" he asked. "I don't know," she whispered. "Someone must have been here, and ran in there!"