"Not to-night. I have to go to the Calhouns. It is just as well, for I have a dread of people suspecting if we meet too often. No one sees us meet. No one knows, and yet I fear them finding out just by instinct. Father said to me the other day, 'What makes you seem so happy these times?' If Mary had been alive she would have found out long ago, for I never could keep anything hid from her. I was nearly saying to him, 'If you want to know why I am so happy go and ask the magnolia tree by the gate.' "Sometimes I feel as if I were deceiving him and everybody. I am, and I don't care--I don't care if they knew. O my darling! My darling! My darling! If the whole world were against you I would love you all the more. I will love you all my life and I will love you when I am dead." Phyl's eyes grew half blind with tears. This cry from the Past went to her heart like a knife. The wind, strengthening for a moment, moved the window curtains, bringing with it the drowsy afternoon sounds of Charleston, sounds that seemed to mock at this voice declaring the deathlessness of its love. It was impossible to go on reading. Impossible to expose any more this heart that had ceased to beat. The meetings in the arbour behind the magnolia tree, the kisses, the words that the leaves and birds alone could hear--they had all ended in death. It did not matter now if the garden gate creaked on its hinges, or if watching eyes from the piazza saw the glossy leaves stirring when no wind could shake them--nothing mattered at all to these people now. She put all the letters back in the bureau, carefully closing them in the secret drawer. CHAPTER VII "Miss Pinckney," said Phyl that night as they sat at supper, "when you left me this afternoon in Juliet's room I stopped to look at the books and things and when I opened the bureau I touched a spring by accident and a little panel fell out and I found a lot of old letters behind it. It was wrong of me to go meddling about and I thought I ought to tell you." "Old letters," said Miss Pinckney, "you don't say--what were they about?" "I read one or two," said the girl. "I'd never, never have dreamed of touching them only--only they were hers--they were to him." "Rupert?" "Yes." "Love letters?" "Yes." Miss Pinckney sighed. "He kept all her letters," said she, "and they came back to her after he was killed. He was killed here in Charleston, at Fort Sumter, in the war; they brought him across here and carried him on a stretcher and she--well, well, it's all done with and let it rest, but it is strange that those letters should have fallen into your hands." "Why, strange?"