"Look at me, Alfred!" she cried, in a rasping tone. "You know you don't mean one single word of all you've just said!"
"Why, I do," he insisted, blandly. "As God is my judge, I do. There ain't no such thing as two loves—a first and a second. When the real thing comes to a body he knows it. A feller could be blinded for a time, I reckon, in hot-blooded youth, while he was in close pursuit of a thing that kept slipping away from him, as was my case when Dick and me was going nip and tuck to see which could get ahead; but the genuine, real thing is as different as—as day from night."
She drew herself up straight, and heaved a deep, lingering sigh. "I don't believe you mean a word of what you say," she repeated. "It ain't natural for a man who is as jealous as—as you always have been even—even of the dead—to set up and talk that way."
"Jealous?" he said, half musingly. "I don't think I'm a jealous man. Anyways, I don't think a feller would have the right to be jealous of a man that was dead and under ground. As I look at it now, I don't think a man has a right, in the best sense, to marry a widow; and in the same way a widower has no right to lay aside his past memories if they are the right sort. They ought to be his best company in his loneliness. Of course, now that you and me are linked together by law and religion, we owe it to the community we live in to do our duty and make the best—I mean, to live along as friendly and harmoniously as we can."
She sank down to the seat again, and sat staring at him fixedly. Presently, seeing that he was not going to resume speaking, she said: "I believe, on my soul, Alfred, you have plumb lost your senses. I may or may not be responsible for it; you may have let all this talk about Dick and my—my thinking about him prey on your mind till it is unhinged. Why, what I done about his grave and memory wasn't anything but respect that was due to him, and has nothing to do with our agreement. You've hurt my feelings, Alfred—you actually have."
She rose suddenly, and, with her handkerchief to her eyes, she started toward the door. She moved slowly, as if she expected him to call her back, as he had frequently done in the past; but he seemed to be oblivious of her presence and not to have heard her last plaintive appeal, for he sat gazing at the light in Dixie Hart's cottage like an unwakable man. She came slowly back, now with stiff, indignant strides—strides which dug deeply into the unoffending turf.
"You certainly are either crazy or a plumb fool!" she fired at him. "You said once that folks hinted that I was cracked in the upper story from the way I acted, but the shoe is on the other foot now. If folks don't say you are out of your head it is because they ain't here to listen to your meandering. A man that will set up and hint to a wife who he loves, and always has loved, that he's willing for her to still care for and cherish another person—I say a man like that is in need of a doctor's advice."
"Well, I was just trying to justify you and your acts," Henley answered in pained retaliation, "and to show you that I had no ill-will in any shape or form. You loved Dick in the right sort of way, and I'm just man enough to lay no obstacle whatever in your track. In the next life you and Dick will be reunited, and all things will be made straight. I don't want to fuss with you over it, Hettie. This life is too beautiful, if it is looked at right, to waste time in jowering. You and me can live in harmony from now on if you'll just be reasonable and not fly off the handle when a feller is doing his level best to arrive at some sort of common meeting-ground. All these years I've been fretting and trying to run a race with a dead man when I could have been in more active business. I've give in at last, and I'm going to stay give in. The truth is, I'm just beginning to live. For the first time in my life I'm in sympathy with true, natural-born, well-mated lovers. If they are tied together, all well and good; but if they are parted by some hook or crook, then they are to be pitied, but still they've got the satisfaction of knowing—well, of knowing what they know—that's all."
"Well, I know one thing," Mrs. Henley said, and she turned away, angrily. "I know you are simply daft—you've lost every grain of sense you ever had."
"I might have known she'd twist the thing all upside-down and never see it right," Henley mused, as he watched her ascend the steps, cross the porch, and disappear in the house. "I thought that view would hit her just right, but, contrary as she always was, she sees fit to disagree. I reckon if she knew everything there would be a row. Huh, I wouldn't risk that with her. She can hold her funeral conclaves, and build monuments to another fellow as high as a church-steeple, and expects me to swallow the dose, but just let me kind o' look about a little, and I'm a fit subject for a madhouse."