"Well, although you may not know it, I am engaged to Louise King. I always have been very fond of her, and when I found I couldn't get Sallie, I was sure I cared as much for Louise as I ever could care for anybody, and I was perfectly satisfied with her--thought she would make me an awfully good wife, and all that. But while Miss Taliaferro was up here visiting Sallie, I was with her a good deal, and the first thing I knew we were dead in love with each other. You know we were both in Sallie's wedding-party, and I tell you, Ruth, to stand up at the altar with a girl he is already half in love with, plays the very deuce with a man. Kentucky girls are all pretty, I suppose--everybody says so, and you have to make believe you think so whether you do or not; but this one--you know her? Isn't she the prettiest thing you ever saw? Well, of course she didn't know I was engaged, and I kept putting off telling her, until the first thing I knew I was letting her see how much I thought of her. I don't suppose it was at all difficult to see, but girls are keen on such subjects, and a man can't be in love with one more than a week before she knows more about it than he does. Then, after she told me that she loved me, how could I tell her that, in spite of what I had said, I was engaged to another girl? Wouldn't she have thought I was a rascal? No; I had to let her go home thinking that, if we were not already engaged, we should be some time, and I went part way with her, and--it was a mean trick to play, but the nonsensical things that unthinking people do precipitate affairs which perhaps without their means might never fully develop. Brian Beck heard that I was going a few miles with her, and he and Sallie and Payson came down to the train to see us off. Just as we pulled out of the station, Brian made the most frantic signs for me to open the window, and when I did so, he threw a tissue-paper package at me. Frankie and I both made an effort to catch it. Of course it burst when we touched it, and a good pound of rice was scattered all over us. You never saw such a sight. It flew in every direction; her hat and my hair were full of it. Some went down my collar. Of course everybody in the car roared and--well, I'm not done blushing at it yet. Frankie took it much better than I, and only laughed at it. But I--I felt more like crying. I saw instantly how it complicated things. It was a nail driven into my coffin.