Annie asked him sarcastically if he thought he had bought with his engagement ring a slave who was never to open her mouth unless he gave her leave.  Then, feeling a bit ashamed of his vehemence and mentally fumbling for words of explanation, he began to say something about what “self-respecting girls” should do.  Annie flashed a blazing look at him, slammed the gate, and left him alone on the sidewalk.  A little later he saw the objectionable man making a bargain with Wing about carrying a note, and with a sore and angry heart he watched the shabby hat and the long queue travel up the hill to the Millner home.

While he was at work among his trees that afternoon he saw them ride past.  He noted the defiant poise of Annie’s head, which did not turn by so much as a hair’s breadth toward the cottage and the trees and him, but he was not near enough to see that her eyes were red and that she bit her lip to control its trembling.  So he wrote a letter to her that evening saying that evidently they had made a mistake; and an hour later he had the engagement ring in his pocket and a great bitterness in his heart.

Two days afterward, as Annie sat on the veranda of a friend’s house near the depot she saw the hotel omnibus coming down the street with Ellison in it.  “Why, there’s Robert!” she exclaimed.

“Yes,” said her friend, looking at her curiously, “he ’s going East.  Did n’t you know it?”

Instantly all of Annie’s pride gave way.  She was in the wrong, she told herself, and she would ask him to forgive her.  She would send a note to him at the station and ask him not to go away without seeing her.

“I ’ll have time,” she thought, “for they said the train is a few minutes late to-day and I ’ll get Wing to carry it over to the station.  There he is now, waiting at the curve.”

She hurriedly pencilled a few words upon a scrap of paper and, folding it as she went, ran down the steps and up a side street parallel with the railroad, and then climbed the low embankment upon which the boy stood.

Wing was waiting in the middle of the track for the train and the ecstasy of his daily performance.  In the meantime he was holding out at arm’s length and considering with proud and satisfied eyes a big, artificial spider and web which had that morning been given to him by one of the ladies at the hotel.

“Wing,” she called, “I want you to run back to the station and give this note to Mr. Ellison.  You ’ll see him there on the platform, or, perhaps, in the baggage room.  You ’ll have plenty of time, for the train ’s late today.  Please go quickly, Wing, for I want him to have the note at once.”

The train was already rumbling in the deep cut just beyond the turn, but the wind was blowing strongly toward it, and neither of them heard the fateful sound.  The high wind caught her dress and blew it against the spider in the boy’s hand.  It tangled the toy in the folds and wrenched it from his fingers and then caught the hem of her gown upon the splitting edge of a worn rail.  As she stooped to loose it the terrible front of the engine appeared, rounding the curve.