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“This last time when I went for her she pretty nigh took my breath away. She seemed just as glad to see me, but she didn’t git into my arms as she ueeter, and she looked different, too. She had growed every way bigger, and wider, and older. I kep’ a-lookin’ at her, tryin’ to find the little girl I’d left some months afore, but she warn’t there. She acted different, too–more quiet like and still, so that I was feared to touch her like I useter, and took it out in talkin’ to her and listenin’ to all she told me o’ what she was larnin’ and how this winter she was goin’ to git through and git her certificate, and then she was goin’ to teach and help her mother–she allus called Marm Marvin mother. Then she told me o’ how one o’ the teachers–a young fellow from a college–was goin’ to set up a school o’ his own and goin’ to git some o’ the graduates to help teach when he got started, and how he had asked her to be one o’ ’em, and how she was goin’ with him.

“Since you been here and us three been together and I begun to see how happy she was a-talkin’ to you and askin’ you questions, I got worse’n ever over her. I begun to see that I warn’t what I had been to her. When we was trampin’ and fishin’ it was all right and she’d talk to me ’bout the ways o’ the birds and what flowers come up fust and all that, but when it got to geography and history I warn’t in it with her, and you was. That sickened me more’n ever. Pretty soon I began to feel as if everything I had in life war slippin’ away from me. I didn’t want her to shut me out from anything she had. I wanted to have half, same’s we allus had–half for me and half for her. Why, lately, when I lay awake nights a-thinkin’ it over, I’ve wished sometimes that she hadn’t growed up at all, and that she’d allus be my baby-girl and I her Uncle Jim.

“Yesterday mornin’–” Jim’s voice broke, and he cleared his throat. “Yesterday mornin’ we went down the branch, as ye know, and she was a-settin’ on a log throwin’ her fly into the pool, when one o’ them song-sparrows lit on a bush and looked at her, and begin to sing like he’d bust his little chest, and she sung back at him with her eyes a-laughin’ and her hair a-flyin’, and I stood lookin’ at her and my heart choked up in my throat, and I leaned over and took the rod out o’ her hand.

“‘Baby-girl,’ I says, ‘there ain’t a bird ’round here that ain’t got a mate; and that’s what makes ’em so happy. I ain’t got nobody but you, Ruby–don’t go ‘way from me, child–stay with me.’ And I told her. She looked at me startled like, same as a deer does when he hears a dog bark; then she jumped up and begin to cry.

“‘Oh, Jim–Jim–dear Jim!’ she says. ‘I love you so, and you’ve been so good to me all my life, but don’t–don’t never say that to me again. That can never be–not so long as we live.’ And she dropped down on the ground and cried till she couldn’t git her breath. Then she got up and kissed my hands and went home, leavin’ me there alone feelin’ like I’d fell off a scaffoldin’ and struck the sidewalk.”

Jim arose from his seat and began pacing the platform again. I had not spoken a word through his long story.

“Jim,” I began, “how old are you?”

“Forty-two,” he said, in a patient, listless way.

“More than twice as old as Ruby, aren’t you? Old enough, really, to be her father. You love her, don’t you–love her for herself–not yourself? You wouldn’t let anything hurt her if you could help it. You were right when you said every bird has its mate. That’s true, Jim, and the way it ought to be–but they mate with this year’s birds, not last year’s. When men get as old as you and I we forget these things sometimes, but they are true all the same.”