Professor Young read it slowly, word by word; each breath taken by the four people could be plainly heard in the silence that followed. Frederick broke it. "Tess, will you come to our home, and tell Father and Mother about--Teola?" The name slipped into a whisper from his lips, and, leaning against the hut door, he burst into boyish, bitter tears. "Forgive me, please," he murmured; "but it was so awful! And what she must have suffered!... And I didn't know--we none of us knew." He lifted his face, swept them with a heartrending glance, and finished. "She died in the church to-day with the baby." "She air happy to be with the man what she loves, ain't she?" said Tess, softly. Frederick grasped her hands, her brilliant smile easing the pain that like a knife stabbed his heart. "You think she was happy to die, Tess?... Tell me all she said.... Did she know she was going away?" For an instant the rapid rush of questions daunted Tessibel. But she sorted them out, commencing from the first one to answer them. "Yep, she air happy," she said positively; "awful happy. She wanted to go to her man in the sky.... He were a-waitin' for her every day, and she knowed she were a-goin' to die, 'cause--'cause she prayed every night that God'd take her and the brat." "Prayed? She prayed to die, when we all loved her so?" stammered Frederick. "Yep. She were a-lovin' the burnt student better'n anything else. And, when women air a-lovin' like that--" She ceased abruptly, and her own love for him attacked her as lightning attacks an oak in the autumn. Teola Graves had gone willingly to the burnt student, and Myra Longman had loved the ugly fisherman with a love that hurt like hers. No one asked the short-skirted, barefooted girl to finish her sentence. The three men understood that her last passionate statement rang from the depths of her woman's heart. Frederick lifted his head. "Tess--Tessibel, I can only say with my father that we all love you for what you have done for her." His voice broke. "And for myself, I say again, as I have said many times, that I--I love you--with my whole soul!" His fingers closed over hers in an intense, desperate clasp. How long she had waited for him to tell her this once more! And he had confessed his great love in the presence of Daddy Skinner and the big man from the hill. Her father watched her, this child whom but a year before he had left almost a baby. She was a woman now, with a woman's voice and a woman's love. The fisherman passed his hand over his face with a forlorn gesture. Had he found his darling again but to lose her? Impetuously Tess turned toward him, and met his misty gaze with her tear-dimmed eyes. The student was still clinging to her hand. "I air Daddy's brat," she whispered. "But I says," and she flashed Frederick a lightning-like glance through the red lashes before she dropped her eyes, and murmured, "but I says, as how I said before, that I air yer squatter."