Her head was low.

Melanie said nothing but patted the foot in its awkward home-made shoe which hung from the stirrup.

I shall die!

Scarlett could not even find voice to say Oh! but Cathleen, peering down suddenly at Melanie, said in a low savage voice: If you cry, Melly, I can't stand it.

Yes, Mr. Hilton, our overseer.

Yes, said Cathleen, shortly.

Is it someone we know, dear?

Then Melanie spoke.

They digested this in silence, looking up at her, puzzled.

I came to tell you that I'm going to be married tomorrow, in Jonesboro��and I'm not inviting you all to come.

Tomorrow, said Cathleen quietly and there was something in her voice which took the eager smiles from their faces.

Cathy, how grand!

I just came to tell you that I'm going to be married.

I won't get down, thank you, she said.

And now there was not a trace of that girl in the stiff figure sitting on the mule.

How pretty and fresh Cathleen had been that day in a swirl of blue organdie with fragrant roses at her sash and little black velvet slippers laced about her small ankles.

Scarlett suddenly remembered the day of the Wilkes barbecue when she and Cathleen had whispered together about Rhett Butler.

But her back was erect and her head was high as she nodded to them.

Cathleen was as white as Cade had been the day Scarlett called, white and hard and brittle, as if her face would shatter if she spoke.

She rode up to the front porch but did not dismount, and Scarlett and Melanie, who had been watching the sunset, went down the steps to meet her.

Her dress was of faded gingham of the type once worn only by house servants, and her sunbonnet was secured under her chin by a piece of twine.

Her sidesaddle was strapped on as sorry a mule as Scarlett had ever seen, a flop-eared lame brute, and Cathleen was almost as sorry looking as the animal she rode.

One day not long after this, Cathleen Calvert rode up to Tara at sunset.

They drove home the rest of the way in silence,

No one can take their places.

There will never again be men like them, said Carreen softly.

Scarlett, all of us with little boys must raise them to take the places of the men who are gone, to be brave men like them.

Ah, said Melanie, sadly, what will the South be like without all our fine boys? What would the South have been if they had lived? We could use their courage and their energy and th ...

There was a glow, an exaltation in her eyes.

There was silence from the back of the wagon for a while and Carreen comforted her sister with absent-minded pats, for her mind was a long way off, riding paths three years old wit ...

But personally, I'd rather be an old maid than marry him.

He hasn't any better sense.

You know perfectly well old Ginger Whiskers isn't dead and that he'll come back and marry you.

Oh, hush! You know how I hate people who bawl all the time.

I think you're hateful.

But look at me! And you've got to be mean and throw it up to me that I'm an old maid when I can't help myself.

Oh, you can talk, sobbed Suellen, because you've been married and had a baby and everybody knows some man wanted you.

Oh, in the name of God, hush! said Scarlett.

Or maybe he had been killed in the last days of the war! The latter would have been infinitely preferable to his forgetting her, for at least there was some dignity about a dead lo ...

She did not know if the lack of mail service was the cause, or if he had merely trifled with her affections and then forgotten her.

She had not heard from Frank Kennedy since Christmas.

Evidently the thought was not new to Suellen who sat in the back of the wagon, for she suddenly began to cry.

And never have any children, added Melanie, to whom this was the most important thing.

Why, Melly, with all the boys dead, there'll be thousands of girls all over the South who'll die old maids.

What's going to happen to them? There's no one to marry them.

Just what I say.

Melly, she said, what's going to happen to Southern girls?

Who would there be to marry her? The thought was appalling.

But suppose she would want to marry.

Besides, the only man she'd ever wanted was Ashley and he was married if he was still living.