At that, Pansy seemed deeply puzzled. “But, Miss Sissie,” she expostulated, “don’t you remember ’at a suttin party – you know, Mista J. W. B. – is ’spectin’ to be yere most any time wid – ”

“Did you hear what I told you?” A quality of metallic harshness in Miss Sissie’s voice was emphasized.

“Yessum, but you know yo’se’f how that there party, Mista J. W. B., is. He’ll shore be dis’p’inted. He’s liable raise Cain. He’s – ”

“Get him on the telephone; you know his number. Tell him this place is closed for tonight and for every day and every night until further notice from me. And tell the same thing to everybody else who calls up or stops by during the reunion. Get me?” By her tone she menaced the darky.

“Yassum.”

“Then turn that hall light out.”

For three days Mr. Braswell abode under that roof. Frequently during that time he remarked that he couldn’t remember when he’d had a pleasanter stay anywhere. Nor could it be said that Miss Sissie failed in any possible effort to make the visit pleasant for him.

He limped down to breakfast next morning; to limp was the best he could do. His entertainer gave her household staff a double surprise, first by coming down to join him at the meal instead of taking her coffee and rolls in her room and second by appearing not in negligée but in a plain dark house-gown which accentuated rather than softened the square contours of her face and the sharp lines in it. By daylight the two had better opportunity to study each other than the somewhat hurried meeting of the night before had afforded.

She saw in him a gentle tottery relic of a man with a pair of faded unworldly old eyes looking out from a bland, wrinkly, rather empty face. He saw in her a most kindly and considerate hostess. Privately he decided she must have had plenty of sorrow in her time – something or other about her told him that life had bestowed upon her more than her proper share of hard knocks. He figured that living here alone in such a big house – except for the servants she seemed to be quite alone – must be lonesome for her, too.

As they sat down, just the two of them, he said, not apologetically exactly but a bit timidly:

“I hope, ma’am, you don’t mind if I say a grace at your table? I always like to invoke the divine blessing before I break bread – seems like to me it makes the victuals taste better. Or maybe” – he hesitated politely – “maybe it’s your custom to ask the blessing your own self?”

“You say it, please,” she urged him in a curious strained fashion, which, however, he did not notice, and lowered her head. She lifted it once – to shoot a quick venomous glance at Pansy, who stood to serve, and a convulsive giggle which had formed in Pansy’s throat died instantly. Then she bowed it again and kept it bowed while he asked God to sanctify this food to their uses and to be merciful to all within those walls and to all His children everywhere. For Jesus’ sake, Amen!

She piled his plate abundantly and, for all his bodily infirmity, he showed her a healthy appetite. He talked freely, she encouraging him by proving a good listener. He was a widower with one married daughter. Since his wife’s death he had made his home with this daughter. Her husband was a mighty fine man – not religious, but high-principled and doing very well indeed as a banker, considering that Forks of Hatchie was such a small town. He himself had been in the grain and feed business for most of his life but was retired now. He’d never been much of a hand for gadding over the world. Going to reunions once a year was about the extent of his traveling around. In all the time since the United Confederate Veterans had been formed he’d missed but one reunion – that was the spring when his wife died.

“Minty – that’s my daughter, ma’am – Minty, she didn’t want me to come to this one,” he went on. “She was afraid for me to be putting out alone on such a long trip ’way down here; she kept saying, Minty did, she was afraid the excitement might be too much for me at my age. But I says to her, I says, ‘Minty, child, when my time comes for me to go I don’t ask anything better than that it should be whilst I’m amongst my old comrades, with the sound of one of our old battle songs ringing in my ears!’ I says to her, ‘Shucks, but what’s the use of talking that way! Nothing’s going to happen to me. I can get there and I can get back!’ I says to her. ‘Going to reunion makes me feel young and spry all over again.’ But, ma’am, I’m afraid Minty was right about it, this time anyhow. I actually don’t believe I’m going to be able to get back down-town for today’s doings – not for the morning’s session anyway. I have to own up to you that I feel all kind of let-down and no-account, someway.”

So through the forenoon he sat in an easy chair in an inner sitting-room and Miss Sissie, abandoning whatever else she might have had to do, read to him the accounts of the great event which filled column after column of the morning paper. He dozed off occasionally but she kept on reading, her voice droning across the placid quiet. Following the dinner which came at midday, she prevailed on him to take a real nap, and he stretched out on a sofa under a light coverlid which she tucked about him and slept peacefully until four o’clock. Late in the afternoon a closed car containing a couple – a man and a woman – stopped in the alleyway behind the house and the driver came to the back door, but Miss Sissie went out and gave him a message for his passengers and he returned to his car and drove away. There were no other callers that day.

Mr. Braswell fretted a little after supper over his inability to muster up strength for getting to the auditorium, but somewhat was consoled by her assurances that a good night’s rest should put him in proper trim for marching in the big parade next morning. By nine o’clock he was in bed and Miss Sissie had a silent idle evening at home and seemed not ungrateful for it.

On the second morning the ancient greeted her in what plainly was his official wardrobe for parading. A frayed and threadbare butternut jacket, absurdly short, with a little peaked tail sticking out behind and a line of tarnished brass buttons spaced down its front, hung grotesquely upon his withered framework. Probably it had fitted him once; now it was acres too loose. Pinned to the left breast was a huge badge, evidently home-made, of yellowed white silk, and lengthwise of it in straggled letters worked with faded red floss ran the number and name of his regiment. In his hand he carried a slouch-hat which had been black once but now was a rusty brown, with a scrap of black ostrich-plume fastened to its band by a brass token.

With trembling fingers he proudly caressed the badge.

“My wife made it for me out of a piece of her own wedding-dress nearly thirty years ago,” he explained. “I’ve worn it to every reunion since then. It’s funny how you put me in mind of my wife. Not that you look like her nor talk like her either. She was kind of small and she had a low voice and you’re so much taller and your way of speaking is deeper and carries further than hers did. And of course you can’t be more than half as old as she’d be if she’d lived. Funny, but you do remind me of her, though. Still, I reckin that’s easy to explain. All good women favor each other some way even when they don’t look alike. It’s something inside of them that does it, I judge – goodness and purity and thinking Christian thoughts.”

If she winced at that last his innocent, weakened old eyes missed it. Anyhow the veteran very soon had personal cause for distress. He had to confess that he wasn’t up to marching. Leaving the dining-room, he practically collapsed. He was heart-broken.

“Don’t you worry,” said Miss Sissie, in that masterful way of hers. “Even if you’re not able to turn out with the rest of them you’re going to see the parade. I can’t send you down-town in my own car – it’s – it’s broken down – and I can’t go with you myself – I – I’m going to be busy. But I can send you in a taxicab with a careful man to drive and you can see the parade.”

“That’s mighty sweet of you – but then, I reckin it’s your nature to be sweet and thoughtful for other folks,” he said gratefully. “But, ma’am” – and doubt crept into his voice – “but ain’t all the public hacks likely to be engaged beforehand for today?”

“I happen to know the manager of the leading taxicab company here,” she told him. “He’ll do what I say even if he has to take a rig away from somebody else. I’ll telephone him.”

“But with the streets all crowded the way they’ll be, won’t it be hard to find a place where I can watch the other boys marching by?” In his eagerness he was childish.

“That’ll be arranged, too,” she stated. “As it so happens, I also know the chief of police. I’ll call him up and give him the number of the taxi you’re in and I’ll guarantee one of his policemen will be on the special lookout for you at the far end of the Drive to see to it that you get a good place somewhere along the route.”

“Seems like to me the most important people in this town must respect you mighty highly!” he exclaimed happily. “Well, I guess it’s that same way everywhere – all kinds of people are bound to recognize a real lady when they meet her and look up to her!”

“Oh, yes, there’s one thing more.” She added this as if by an afterthought. “You needn’t tell anybody you meet – any of your old friends or any of the committeemen or anybody – where you’re stopping. You see, I didn’t arrange to take in any visitors for the reunion – there were reasons why I didn’t care to take in anyone – and now that I have you with me I wouldn’t care for anybody connected with the local arrangements to know about it. You understand, don’t you? – they might think I was presuming on their rights.”

“Oh, yes’m, I understand,” he said unsuspectingly. “It’ll just be a little secret between us if that’s the way you’d rather it was. But I couldn’t rightly tell anybody anyhow – seeing that you ain’t ever told me what your last name is. I’d like to know it, too – I aim to write you a letter after I get home.”

“My name is Lamprey,” she said. “Cecelia Lamprey. I don’t hear it very often myself – at least, not spoken out in full. And now I’d better be ringing up those influential friends of mine – you mustn’t be late getting started.”

The same taxicab driver who drove him on this day came again on the third day to take Miss Sissie’s venerable house guest to his train. It would appear that her car still was out of commission.

She did not accompany him to the station. Domestic cares would hold her, she told him. She did not go to the front of the house to see him off, either. Indeed a more observant person than Mr. Braswell might have marveled that so constantly she had secluded herself indoors during his visit; and not only indoors, but behind windows curtained against the bright, warm Southern sunshine. They exchanged their farewells in her living-room.

“I ain’t never going to forget you,” he told her. “If you’d been my own daughter you couldn’t ’a’ treated me any nicer than what you have – and me just an old stove-up spavined country-jake that you never saw before in your life and probably never will see again. You ain’t seen fit, ma’am, to tell me much about yourself – seems like you let me do most of the talking, and that suited me – but old as I am I know a perfect lady when I see one and that’s what you are, ma’am, and what always you must have been and always will be – good-by and God bless you!”

Saying nothing, she bent in the attitude of one accepting a benediction, and a moment later she was following him to the door and watching him as he crept in his labored, faltering gait along the entrance-hall. Under his arm was his luncheon to be eaten on the train; she had with her own hands prepared and boxed it. She waited there on the threshold until the hooded front door clicked behind him.

“Pansy,” she called then toward the back of the house, and now her voice had in it a customary rasping quality which, strangely, had been almost altogether lacking from it these past two or three days. “You, Pansy!”

“Yassum.”

“You might call up that party that we turned down the other night and tell him this place has reopened for business as usual.”

Approximately two weeks later, Mr. Randolph Embury, president of the Forks of Hatchie People’s Bank, wrote as follows to the mayor of that city where the veterans had met:

“Dear Mr. Mayor: You may possibly recall that we met in 1922 while serving as delegates for our respective states at the Inter-Southern Commercial Congress in Norfolk? I am therefore taking advantage of our slight acquaintance and am trespassing upon your patience to ask a favor which means a great deal to my wife.

“Her aged father, the late Nathan Braswell, attended the recent Confederate Reunion in your city. Almost immediately upon his arrival back at this place he suffered a stroke of paralysis. Within ten days a second stroke resulted fatally to him. The interment took place yesterday, the twenty-ninth inst. His loss in this community is very deeply mourned. He was the last old soldier left here.

“Although rendered completely helpless by the first stroke, he remained almost entirely rational and coherent until the second one occurred. In this stage of his illness he spoke repeatedly of his experiences while at the reunion. He was a guest in the private home of one who must have been a most cultured and charming lady – undoubtedly a lady of position and affluence. By her graciousness and her zealous care of him and her constant ministrations to his comfort she made a deep impression upon him. He was most anxious that she should know of his gratitude, and repeatedly he charged us to write her, telling how much he appreciated the attentions shown him.

“Naturally, during his illness and until after the interment neither my wife nor myself had much time for letter-writing. But this morning Mrs. Embury wrote to this lady, thanking her in her dead father’s name and in ours and telling her that with practically his last conscious breath he spoke affectionately of her and paid tribute to her splendid womanly qualities and even uttered a little prayer for her well-being. He was a very devout man. That letter I enclose with this one, but in an unaddressed envelop. Mrs. Embury, of course, is most anxious that it should reach the intended recipient promptly.

“The reason for not addressing it you will understand when I tell you that my father-in-law could not remember his benefactress’s last name except that it began with an ‘L’ and sounded something like ‘Lampey’ or ‘Lambry.’ He referred to her always as ‘Miss Sissie,’ which I would judge was her familiar name among more intimate friends. He could not remember the name of the street upon which she resided. However, he did describe the residence as being a very large and very handsome one, standing in a somewhat secluded part of the outskirts and not far from where a railroad track and an overhead viaduct were.

“This, then, is the favor I would ask of you: If the lady is as prominently connected as I had reason to believe from Mr. Braswell’s statements, I assume you know her already. If not, I take it that it should not be a very difficult matter to locate one whose character and attainments must have given her a high standing among your good citizens. So I am asking you to see to it that the enclosed letter is put at once into her hands.

“Thanking you in advance for any trouble or inconvenience to which you may be put in carrying out our wishes, I remain,

“Yours most sincerely,

“Randolph Embury.”

And within four days got back the following reply:

“Mayor’s Office, June 2.

“Dear Sir:

“Yours received and contents carefully noted. In reply to same would say that while ready at any time to serve you and your good wife in every way possible, yet in this case I am put in a delicate attitude and fear you also may be put in one should I undertake to fulfill your desire.

“Undoubtedly the person that your late father-in-law had in mind was one Cecelia Lamprey, better known as ‘Sis.’ But not by the widest stretch of imagination could anyone think of her as a ‘lady.’ She is the proprietress of a most notorious assignation house located on North Bonaventure Avenue, this city, and according to my best information and belief, has always been a woman of loose morals and bad repute. I might add that having been elected on a reform ticket and being committed to the task of ridding our city of evil, I am at present setting on foot an effort to close up her establishment, which has until lately enjoyed secret ‘protection,’ and to drive her from our midst.

“Accordingly, I am constrained to believe that, being probably semi-delirious, the lately deceased, your esteemed father-in-law, must have made a mistake. I assume that he had ‘Sis’ Lamprey’s house pointed out to him and in his ravings got it confused with the domicile where he was housed during his sojourn among us. It is not conceivable to me that a man such as you describe would, while in his sober senses, set foot inside an establishment so readily recognizable at a glance as being absolutely disreputable, let alone remain there for any appreciable period of time. It is equally incredible to think of ‘Sis’ opening her doors to any decent person or for any worthy purpose.

“In view of these facts I am constrained to believe your wife would shrink from any contact or any communication with such an individual. I am therefore taking the liberty of holding her letter on my desk until you and she have had opportunity to consider this embarrassing situation and to decide what you should do. My advice is that you instruct me to return the letter to you at once and consider the incident closed. However, I await your further instruction.

(Signed) “Jason Broderick, Mayor.”

To which the following reply was immediately dispatched by wire:

“Nevertheless, on behalf of my wife and myself, kindly be so good as immediately to deliver the letter in question to the lady in question.”