"We sent him into town here, after we came to Aden, to the Presbyterian minister, who taught him. He wanted to go to college, not that he'd admit it now. Then as soon as he was any size he began at his father about reclaiming the grove. That is, Willy planned and Georges listened. Willy'd got an idea from Mr. Jonas that the railroad was coming through some day, just as it has, but it's been a long pull and a wait, for this is the first full yield for his trees. He's been offered seven thousand for the crop as it hangs, but the mortgage is eight thousand on the place, which went for fertilizing and ditching and sheds, and living, you know, so Willy is holding for eight thousand and Mr. Jonas is urging for nine." Charlotte's pride in these statements was beaming. "As soon as the grove proves itself, the place will sell for several times its old value, and we're going back to Kentucky, to Woodford. Willy wants to buy back my father's farm, not that he'll let me say that he does, he's so afraid of admitting anything, but when he was nineteen, three years ago, he had the measles--wasn't it dear and comical, like he was a child again--and he let me hold his hand, in the dark room, you know, and we talked about it, when we would go back." The girl was patting Charlotte's hand softly and winking back tears while she laughed. Why tears? She herself had no idea. Mrs. Leroy had a thousand questions to ask, she said, but somehow she never got to them. "Dear me," she said presently, "we have to go and I've talked of nothing but my own affairs. In my solitude down here I've grown a shameless egotist." As if she had been ever anything else, the unconscious soul! "But to be with one of my own sex--some one linked with the past, too, is extenuation. There's so much a woman can't talk of with men, they have such different ways of seeing things, and let her love her men folk never so dearly, if there's none of her own sex around, a woman's lonesome, Alexina." "Yes," said Alexina, "she is." But she said it absently, for she was conscious of King William's gaze being upon her. She looked up laughing, yet a little confused, for his look was warm. He slipped along the railing, leaving Mrs. Garnier and the minister chatting. In this blue serge suit and straw hat he looked very like the King William of long ago, dark, keen and impatient. "What do you think of it, Aden?" he asked. "I like it," said Alexina. "Somehow as soon as you are in a thing the scene changes to out of doors. It used to be Indians on the common, or Crusoe in the yard, back there in Louisville." "You began by saying you liked it," he reminded her. Did he think to tease? His eyes were naughty. Here was a zest; this was no Georgy. "And I do," she said, standing to it. "I do like it." Was he always laughing at people, this William Leroy?