Stevie says he went through days and days of it, and for a while he was scared that it might last forever, and he don't ever want to be in love again. Suppose it should be found out on a fellow that he was in love?
“Stevie,” says Freckles, “this is different.”
Stevie asks him how he means.
“I want her to know,” says Freckles.
“Great Scott!” says Stevie. “No!”
“Uh-huh!”
“It don't show on you, Freckles,” says Stevie.
Freckles says of course it don't show. Only first love shows, he says. Once before he was in love, he says, and that showed on him. That was last spring, and he was only a kid then, and he was in love with Miss Jones, the school teacher, and didn't know how to hide it. But this time he can hide it, because this time he feels that it is different. He swallows down the signs of it, he says, the way you keep swallowing down the signs of it when you have something terrible like heart-disease or stomach-trouble, and nobody will ever know it about him, likely, till after he is dead.
And when he is dead, Freckles says, they will all wonder what he died of, and maybe he will leave a note, wrote in his own blood, to tell. And they will all come in Injun file and pass through the parlour, he says, where his casket will be set on to four chairs, and She will come filing by and look at him, and she will say not to bury him yet, for there is a note held tight in his hand.
And everybody will say: “A note? A note? Who can it be to?”