“Old Caleb saw that Bernie had been through some terrific experience and wasn’t long worming it out. He didn’t have much to say. All the same, he wanted her to come back to Paris and keep house for him. They quarreled before Bernie returned to Springfield—with the mother not two days buried. And I guess Bernie said some snippy things that cut the old man pretty deep. It seems old Caleb had a love affair when a young man, but the girl broke it off because she didn’t think herself competent to be his wife. He stood in just that awe of the sex that he didn’t try to persist and overcome that foolish little objection. And the disappointment gashed deep. He married the Duchess much as I married Mildred. The wound healed but the scars never left his heart. And Bernie learned of it and twitted him about it. Her principal indictment of old Caleb was that he had been content to remain a small-town man and bring her up as a small-town girl so that when she got out in the world ‘among real people’, as she called it, she was always at a disadvantage.” “There was a rumor about the place a few years ago that she married a Chicago millionaire.” “She did. But whether she found happiness with him seems to be unknown, at least back here at home. I don’t believe her dad has heard a word from her since she left in high dudgeon after her mother’s funeral.” Nathan paced along by my side for a quarter-mile in silence. Then he laughed sadly and said, “Bill, did you ever know about me asking Bernie to marry me, the week before she went away to school?” “Marry you! Why, Bernie was only about fifteen——” “I know it! That’s why it’s so amusing—about as funny as the ‘Death of Little Nell.’ It was down along the pathway through the Haskell meadow—the ‘short cut’ from Matthews Court to Windsor Street—all built up now with bungalows. I met her and proposed to her desperately—poor short-trousered little ass that I was. But she was mad at me; she said I hadn’t the backbone of a fish. If I was half a man I’d get a gun and shoot dad for whaling me that picnic day in front of everybody. She ended by calling me a freckled-faced little frump and declared when she married any one, it was going to be a millionaire. Well, she made good there, all right. But the way she scorched me at the time surely blistered for many a month afterward. I remember I returned home, took all her letters and tied them up with a ribbon—my first rosary. I hid them away out in the ell attic of the Spring Street house. By gosh, they must be there yet! I haven’t thought of them from that day to this!”