“No.  He was here, but he returned to St. Louis this morning.”

“Will he come again?”

“No.”

My mother turned away, the fire all gone from her, and said, “Let us go home.”

They went straight back to Keokuk.  My mother sat silent and thinking for many days—­a thing which had never happened before.  Then one day she said: 

“I will tell you a secret.  When I was eighteen, a young medical student named Barrett lived in Columbia (Ky.) eighteen miles away; and he used to ride over to see me.  This continued for some time.  I loved him with my whole heart, and I knew that he felt the same toward me, though no words had been spoken.  He was too bashful to speak—­he could not do it.  Everybody supposed we were engaged—­took it for granted we were—­but we were not.  By and by there was to be a party in a neighboring town, and he wrote my uncle telling him his feelings, and asking him to drive me over in his buggy and let him (Barrett) drive me back, so that he might have that opportunity to propose.  My uncle should have done as he was asked, without explaining anything to me; but instead, he read me the letter; and then, of course, I could not go—­and did not.  He (Barrett) left the country presently, and I, to stop the clacking tongues, and to show him that I did not care, married, in a pet.  In all these sixty-four years I have not seen him since.  I saw in a paper that he was going to attend that Old Settlers’ Convention.  Only three hours before we reached that hotel, he had been standing there!”

Since then, her memory is wholly faded out and gone; and now she writes letters to the school-mates who had been dead forty years, and wonders why they neglect her and do not answer.

Think of her carrying that pathetic burden in her old heart sixty-four
years, and no human being ever suspecting it! 
                              Yrs ever,
          
                              mark.

We do not get the idea from this letter that those two long ago sweethearts quarreled, but Mark Twain once spoke of their having done so, and there may have been a disagreement, assuming that there was a subsequent meeting.  It does not matter, now.  In speaking of it, Mark Twain once said:  “It is as pathetic a romance as any that has crossed the field of my personal experience in a long lifetime.”—­[When Mark Twain:  A Biography was written this letter had not come to light, and the matter was stated there in accordance with Mark Twain’s latest memory of it.]

Howells wrote:  “After all, how poor and hackneyed all the inventions are compared with the simple and stately facts.  Who could have imagined such a heart-break as that?  Yet it went along with the fulfillment of everyday duty and made no more noise than a grave under foot.  I doubt if fiction will ever get the knack of such things.”