"It ain't your business, Myron, any more'n 'tis mine. Hermie's much my son as he is your'n, and what you bought that place with is as much mine as 'tis your'n. I helped you earn it. Myron, it's comin' up in me. I can feel it."
"What is?"
In spite of all his old dull certainties, he felt the shock of wonder. He looked at her, her scarlet cheeks and widening eyes. Even her pretty hair seemed to have acquired a nervous life, and stood out in a quivering aureole. Myron was much bound to his Caddie in his way of being attached to his own life and breath. A change in her was horrible to him, like the disturbance of illness in an ordered house.
"What is it?" he inquired again. "What is it you feel?"
"It's that," she said, with an added vehemence. "It's my double personality."
Myron Dill could have wept from the surprise of it all, the assault upon his wondering nerves.
"You spread up the bed in the bedroom, Caddie," he bade her, "and go lay down a spell."
"No," said his wife, "I sha'n't lay down, and I sha'n't give up to you. It's riz up in me, the one that's goin' to beat, no matter what comes of it, same as old Abner Kinsman stood up ag'inst the British. Mebbe it'll die fightin', same's he did, and I never'll hear no more from it,—and a good riddance. But Myron, it's goin' to beat."
Her husband was frowning, not harshly now, but from the extremity of his distress. He spoke in a tone of well-considered adjuration.
"Caddie, you know what you're doin' of? You're settin' up your will in place o' mine."