"I declare, I ain't to say religious, but I b'lieve that notice was sent to me providential.
"Of co'se, maybe she wouldn't look at me ef I ast her; but one thing shore, she can't if I don't.
"Claybank is a good hund'ed miles from here 'n' I couldn't leave the farm now, noways; besides, the day I start a-makin' trips from home, talk'll start, an' I'll be watched close-ter'n what I'm watched now—ef that's possible. But th' ain't nothin' to hender me writin'—ez I can see."
This idea, once in his mind, lent a new impulse to Ezra's life, a fresh spring to his gait, so evident to solicitous eyes that during the next week even his dog noticed it and had a way of running up and sniffing about him, as if asking what had happened.
An era of hope had dawned for the hitherto downcast man simply because Miss Myrtle Musgrove, a woman he had never seen, had abolished whipping in a distant school.
Two weeks passed before Ezra saw his way clearly to write the proposed letter, but he did, nevertheless, in the interval, walk up and down his butter-bean arbor on moonlight nights, imagining Miss Myrtle beside him—Miss Myrtle, named for his favorite flower. He had preferred the violet, but he had changed his mind. Rose-colored crêpe-myrtles were blooming in his garden at the time. Maybe this was why he began to think of her as a pink-faced laughing girl, typified by the blushing flower. Everything was so absolutely real in her setting that the ideal girl walked, a definite embodiment of his fancy, night after night by his side, and whether it was from his life habit or an intuitive fancy, he looked upward into her face. He had always liked tall women.
And all this time he was trying to frame a suitable letter to the real "popular and accomplished Miss Musgrove," of Claybank Academy.
Finally, however, the ambitious and flowery document was finished.
It would be unfair to him whose postscript read, "For Your Eyes alone," to quote in full, for the vulgar gratification of prying eyes, the pathetic missive that told again the old story of a lonely home, the needed woman. But when it was sent, Ezra found the circuit of the butter-bean arbor too circumscribed a promenade, and began taking the imaginary Miss Myrtle with him down through his orchard and potato-patch.
It was during these moonlight communings that he seemed to discover that she listened while he talked—a new experience to Ezra—and that even when he expressed his awful doubts as to the existence of a personal devil she only smiled, and thought he might be right.