Opposite to me, Sally smiled with beaming eyes when she met my gaze. I knew that she was hugging her secret, and I knew, in some intuitive way, that she expected this secret to afford me pleasure. The General, peering from right to left in search of associations, kept moving his lips as if he were thinking aloud. On his face, in the deep creases where the perspiration had gathered, the dust, rising from the street, had settled in greyish streaks. From time to time, in an absent-minded manner, he got out his big white silk handkerchief and wiped it away. "There now! I've got it! Hold on a minute, Balaam. That's the house that Robert Carrington built clean over here on the other side of the hill. There it is now--the one with that pink crape myrtle in the yard, and the four columns, you can see it with your own eyes. Theophilus tried to prove to me that Robert lived in Bushrod's house, and that he'd attended him there in his last illness. Last illness, indeed! The truth is that Theophilus isn't what he once was. Memory's going and he doesn't like to own it. No use arguing with him--you can't argue with a man whose memory is going--but there's Robert Carrington's house. You've seen it with your own eyes. Drive on, Balaam." Balaam drove on; and the carriage, leaving the city and the thinning suburbs, passed rapidly into one of the country roads, white with dust, which stretched between ragged borders of yarrow and pokeberry that were white with dust also. The fields on either side, sometimes planted in corn, oftener grown wild in broomsedge or life-everlasting, shimmered under the heat, which was alive with the whirring of innumerable insects. Here and there a negro cabin, built close to the road, stood bare in a piece of burned-out clearing, or showed behind the thick fanlike leaves of gourd vines, with the heads of sunflowers nodding heavily beside the open doorways. Occasionally, in the first few miles, a covered wagon crawled by us on its way to town, the driver leaning far over the dusty horses, and singing out "Howdy!" in a friendly voice,--to which the General invariably responded "Howdy," in the same tone, as he touched the wide brim of his straw hat with his ebony stick. "Hasn't got on the scent, has he?" he enquired presently of Sally, with a sly wink in my direction. "Are you sure George hasn't let it out? Never could keep a secret, could George. He's one of those close-mouthed fellows that shuts a thing up so tight it explodes before he's aware of it. He can't hide anything from me. I read him just as if he were a book. It's as well, I reckon, as I told him the other day, that he isn't still in love with your wife, Ben, or it would be written all over him as plain as big print." My eyes caught Sally's, and she blushed a clear, warm pink to the heavy waves of her hair.