“And you will stay with me, if I stay here?” Kitty said to her, when they returned from burying Hal beside his mother in the old yard behind the church. “I don’t know what I am to do. Tom is in California, and father has lost everything and is boarding in Lexington, and this house is so big for baby and me.” She clung like a child to Connie, who replied: “I’ll stay until matters are adjusted.” “What matters?” Kitty asked, wholly unsuspicious of the mortgages and notes which would soon come up before her, making her cry out, in anguish: “Oh, Harry, I never dreamed of this. I wish I had died before I knew it.” CHAPTER XVIII WINDING UP So far as Hal’s debts were concerned, it was a rapid progress. He died in August, and promptly on the first day of September Jones appeared at the farmhouse, with his note for three thousand dollars. He had heard rumors of Harry’s insolvency, but it didn’t concern him. The deacon was on his paper, and that girl, who, he heard, had a big gold mine in the West, paying hundreds a day. She was bound as well as the deacon, and he wondered why the latter should have grown so old and worried-looking. “To be sure, paying the money might mean his farm and house, but the girl won’t allow that. They say she’s to marry Dr. Ken,” he thought, as he rode up to the farmhouse. Connie stayed mostly with Kitty, but this morning she was at the barn watching the cats eating their milk in the long trough, and talking to the deacon, who tried to seem natural, although his heart was very sad. He knew that Harry had scarcely left enough to pay his funeral expenses, and the note lay heavily upon his mind. He knew Jones, and expected him that day, but not quite so early, and he groaned aloud as he saw him hitching his old white horse at the gate and then come smilingly up the walk, while he and Connie went to meet him. “Good-mornin’, deacon. Good-mornin’, miss. I am in luck to find you both together,” he said. “There’s that little matter of three thousand, with interest, lent to young Morris, with you two as sureties, and it is due to-day. I hear he wasn’t worth a red, and lived like a prince, with three or four niggers and a coachman, who wore a high hat and brass buttons, and the widder keeps up the same style, though the Lord knows how she is goin’ to pay for it all, with them other debts. She or’to be economical, but what can you expect from a Southern woman, who has never let one hand wash the other, and is too big for common folks.” “If you mean Mrs. Harold Morris,” Connie said, stepping up to him, “I’d like you to speak more respectfully of her. As long as the creditors get their money, it’s none of their business what she does. They will be paid. You will be paid;—not this minute, of course. I don’t keep three thousand dollars lying loose in my pocket, but it is in the bank, and you are not to trouble Deacon Stannard. It is my matter.”