I said. "And if anybody has to pay, I'm the one to do it." And I paid
all right. Paid to the full. But it's over now, and I'm not going to
think about it any more. When a thing is over, that should be the end
of it, Miss Katherine says, and with me what she says goes.

Miss Bray is away. If some of her relations liked her well enough to
have her stay a few months with them, she could get leave of absence;
but she's never been known to stay but four weeks. She's gone to visit
her sister somewhere in Fauquier County. Her sister's husband always
leaves home for his health when she arrives, and Miss Bray says she
thinks it's so queer he has the same kind of spells at the same time
every year.

But now Miss Katherine's back, nothing matters. Nothing!

Yesterday I was just a squirrel in a cage. All day long I was saying:
"Well, Squirrel, turn your little wheel. That's all you can do; turn
your little wheel." And inside I was turning as hard and fast as a
sure-enough squirrel turns; but outside I was just mechanical.

I wonder sometimes I don't blaze up right before people's eyes. I'm so
often on fire--that is, my mind and heart are--that I think at times my
body will surely catch. Thus far it hasn't, but if I don't go somewhere,
see something, do something different, it's apt to, and the doctors
won't have a name for the new kind of inflammation.

I'm going to die after a while, and I'm so afraid I will do it before I
travel some that if I were a boy child I'd go anyhow. But I can't go.
That is, not yet.