Her mother and father were both dead, and she and her brothers lived on their plantation.  Zebbie had never dared speak to her until one day he had driven over with his mother and sisters to a dinner given on a neighboring plantation.  He was standing outside near the wall, when some one dropped a spray of apple blossoms down upon him from an upper window.  He looked up and Pauline was leaning out smiling at him.  After that he made it a point to frequent places where he might expect her, and things went so well that presently Caesar was left at home lest he should tell the brothers.  She was a loyal little soul and would not desert, although he urged her to, even promising to go away, “plumb away, clean to Scott County if she would go.”  She told him that her brothers would go even as far as that to kill him, so that they must wait and hope.  Finally Zebbie got tired of waiting, and one day he boldly rode up to the Gorley home and formally asked for Pauline’s hand.  The bullet he got for his presumption kept him from going to the war with his father and brother when they marched away.

Some time later George Gorley was shot and killed from ambush, and although Zebbie had not yet left his bed the Gorleys believed he did it, and one night Pauline came through a heavy rainstorm, with only Caesar, to warn Zebbie and to beg him, for her sake, to get away as fast as he could that night.  She pleaded that she could not live if he were killed and could never marry him if he killed her brothers, so she persuaded him to go while they were all innocent.

Well, he did as she wished and they never saw each other again.  He never went home again until last Thanksgiving, and dear little Pauline had been dead for years.  She herself had taken her little gifts for Zebbie to Mothie to keep for him.  Some years later she died and was buried in the dress she mentioned.  It was woven at Adeline Carter’s, one of the bitterest enemies of the Gorleys, but the sacrifice of her pride did her no good because she was long at rest before Zebbie knew.  He had been greatly grieved because no stone marked her grave, only a tangle of rose-briers.  So he bought a stone, and in the night before Decoration Day he and two of Uncle Buck’s grandsons went to the Gorley burying-ground and raised it to the memory of sweet Pauline.  Some of the Gorleys still live there, so he came home at once, fearing if they should find out who placed the stone above their sister they would take vengeance on his poor, frail body.

After he had finished telling me his story, I felt just as I used to when Grandmother opened the “big chist” to air her wedding clothes and the dress each of her babies wore when baptized.  It seemed almost like smelling the lavender and rose-leaves, and it was with reverent fingers that I folded the shirt, the work of love, yellow with age, and laid it in the box....