The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-09-30
.sy Honore wilsie.

Priscilla sat rigidly in the old gar
 den chair where she had thrown her
 self at the beginning Of their conver"
 satiop. The scent of the cinnamon TO- ses was half cloying.
 But" she repeated, monotonously,
 T can't see why you did It. Stuart walked from the tingiing fountain to the chair, looked down on Priscilia's lovely head. with his white lips close shut, strode back to the fountain, then pasued again before her. 7. And I can tell you again. Priscilla, only that don't know why deceived you: not maliciously. believe me. Ev-
 CT since I was a little chap have loved the South with an intense sort of feeling that I have never tried to explain. I was ony youngster when I began to call myself. Southerner, and" he smfed, cynicaIiy. T took a boyish pride in adopting the chival- rous manner of a Southern gentleman. After you came North to live, with your intense Southern loyalty. and l swore to win you, 1t was only too easy to carry on the deception"
 Priscilla watched him with her stea- dy gray eyes. She had the beauty of the stately old garden where she sat-; a quaint, old-time lovelfness that be- longed as much to the rows of holly hooks and the privet hedges as dld the slender sun dial that stood beside the fountain, though Priscilla, like the harebell that grew close by, was the embodiment of the epnemeral loveli- ness of youth.
 If was useless to interpret it as the tinting of the sinking sun. A slow flush was creeping up her throat She rose, drawing herself to her slender height, her curled red lips curVing proudly.
 'of course you cannot think that l
 will ever have the same trust for you again, Stuart. All that Is gone now. Nothing could prove quite so conclu- siyely as this that you are not a south- erner"
 ened still more. What shall We oo. Priscilla?" he asked: what shall we do?"
 The troubled. broken voice and the contrite simplicity of tho question were, perhaps, hard for Priscilla 10 hear. But the beautiful he'd set so nobly upon the slender necK did not turn again in his direction. She watched the prism lights in the tinkling toun- tain.
 not being a Southerner than I can the fact that you have persIstently ana deliberately deceived me about 1t for so long"
 Then silence. except for the silly ves- per thrush that tried to ease matters with It's bitter-sweet notes from the birch tree, and except for the foun- tain that purled and whispered or thS uselessness of it.
 "And so," with a little culver oB the soft throat and of the curled lips, land so, we will end it, here"
 Still no word from Stuart. though Priscilla waited moment before she made her way up the graveled path to inc open door. He stood quite mo- straight, young figure, with fine eyes, stern and hurt. The palest yellow Of the fountain changed to orange, the orange to lavender, the lavender to purple, which lost itself in the dusk Then he turned, and perhaps Priscilla heard the garden gate latch behind him, but she made no sign.
 And so the garden lay all night, whitened for a time by the moonlight, then deep hidden in the somber back that comes just before the dawn; then bridal gray in the early daybreak. Far at one end of the village street, in the reen-shuttered house that looked out over the meaoow, Stuart sat all night with hIs face pressed a against the window that gave toward the gabled roof of the old manor house He knew that the fountain tinkled faintly for Priscilla's ears; that she who had loved him with all the depth of her proud little heart was also sleepless through the long hours before the coming day.
 Stuart was very bitter over his fol- ly, yet even to himself he could give no adequate explanation. He knew only that his love for the South. that had been the one sweet and life-giving fact of his lonely childhood, had come at last to work him narm: that the story which he, as hero, had lived so long that years ago ne had come to believe 1t himself. was only a dream after all The pictures OF wide stretch es of cotton fields. Of moss-hung live oaks, of the fluted pillars or hos pitable doorway, that had been Q part