The dreary summer weeks dragged by like an eternity; the autumn came and passed, and at the first of the year I was sent down, with a salary of ten thousand dollars, to build up traffic on the Tennessee and Carolina Railroad, which the Great South Midland and Atlantic had absorbed. Sally went with me, but she was so languid and ill that the change, instead of invigorating her, appeared to exhaust her remaining vitality. She lived only when I was with her, and when I came in unexpectedly, as I did sometimes, I would find her lying so still and cold on the couch that I would gather her to me in a passion of fear lest she should elude the lighter grasp with which I had held her. Never, not even in her girlhood, had I loved her with the intensity, the violence, of those months when I hardly dared clasp her to me in my terror that she might dissolve and vanish from my embrace. Then, at last, when the spring came, and the woods were filled with flowering dogwood and red-bud, she seemed to revive a little, to bloom softly again, like a flower that opens the sweeter and fresher after the storm. "Is it the mild air, or the spring flowers?" I asked one afternoon, as we drove through the Southern woods, along a narrow deserted road that smelt of the budding pines. "Neither, Ben, it is you," she replied. "I have had you all these months. Without that I could not have lived." "You have had me," I answered, "ever since the first minute I saw your face. You have had me always." "Not always. During those years of your great success I thought I had lost you." "How could you, Sally, when it was all for you, and you knew it?" "It may have been for me in the beginning, but success, when it came, crowded me out. It left me no room. That's why I didn't really mind the failure, dear, and the poverty--that's why I don't now really mind this burden of debt. Success took you away from me, failure brings you the closer. And when you go from me, Ben, there's something in me, I don't know what--something, like Aunt Matoaca in my blood--that rises up and rebels. If things had gone on like that, if you hadn't come back, I should have grown hard and indifferent. I should have found some other interest." "Some other interest?" I repeated, while my heart throbbed as if a spasm of memory contracted it. "Oh, of course, I don't know now just what I mean--but when I look back, I realise that I couldn't have stood many years like that with nothing to fill them. I'd have done something desperate, if it was only going over gates after Bonny. There's one thing they taught me, though, Ben," she added, "and that is that poor Aunt Matoaca was right." "Right in what, Sally?"