He had delayed closing the bargain until he discussed it with Scarlett.

However, he had learned that day in Fayetteville that he could cut this expense a fourth by lending the horse and wagon for two weeks to the gin owner.

Will Benteen sat on the front steps at Scarlett's feet in the pleasant sunshine of the early autumn afternoon and his flat voice went on and on languidly about the exorbitant costs ...

It was September and time to pick the cotton.

With Will in the house, everyone felt safe in leaving Wade and the two babies while they went about their tasks, for he could care for them as deftly as Mammy and only Melly surpas ...

He was clever at whittling and Wade was constantly by his side, for he whittled out toys for him, the only toys the little boy had.

When he was able to totter about the house, he turned his hands to weaving baskets of split oak and mending the furniture ruined by the Yankees.

Eventually all the family found their way to Will's room to air their troubles��even Mammy, who had at first been distant with him because he was not quality and had owned only t ...

She even told him of killing the Yankee and glowed with pride when he commented briefly: Good work!

She could tell Will anything.

Yes, Will was a comfort to Scarlett after hard days when the negroes muttered and Suellen nagged and cried and Gerald asked too frequently where Ellen was.

Yet, none of these things seemed to bother him any more than the leg he had left in Virginia.

His sister, his only relative, had moved to Texas with her husband years ago and he was alone in the world.

He knew his slaves were free now and the farm gone to weeds and seedling pines.

She told him about her problems of weeding and hoeing and planting, of fattening the hogs and breeding the cow, and he gave good advice for he had owned a small farm in south Georg ...

Will was pleasant to talk to because he had so little to say and yet was so understanding a listener.

Not Miss Carreen, he said with finality.

She said as much to Will but he shook his head.

And she knew one girl in Atlanta who had been widowed three times by the war and was still able to take notice of men.

She'd certainly gotten over Charles.

Lots of girls got over dead sweethearts, yes, dead husbands, too.

Well, she'd get over it.

So that was why Carreen mooned about, praying all the time.

So he knew things about her own family which she had not troubled to discover.

She looked curiously at this lanky man with his bony stooped shoulders, his pinkish hair and calm unwavering eyes.

She said he was the only boy she'd ever cared about and so it kind of comforts her to pray for him.

But, all the same, he was her beau after you turned him down, because when he come home on his last furlough they got engaged.

Looks like most of the County was your beaux.

Yes, so she told me.

Her beau, nothing! He and his brother were my beaux.

Her beau? said Scarlett shortly.

Her beau, that boy Brent something-or-other who was killed at Gettysburg.

He took it as naturally as he did the fact that Carreen had found comfort in talking to him, a stranger.

That Scarlett did not know what was in her sister's heart did not seem odd to him.

Perhaps he had seen too much of the unexpected ever to be startled again.

Nothing seemed to surprise or excite him.

His faded blue eyes looked at her from under sandy lashes without surprise.

She said as much to Will Benteen one afternoon when he was able to sit up in a chair and was startled when he said in his flat voice: Let her be, Miss Scarlett.

And whenever she found Carreen on her knees when she should have been taking an afternoon nap or doing the mending, she felt that Carreen was shirking her share of the burdens.

God had broken the bargain time and again, to her way of thinking, and she felt that she owed Him nothing at all now.

She promised God good behavior in exchange for favors.

Religion had always been a bargaining process with Scarlett.

If God had seen fit to punish them so, then God could very well do without prayers.

The sight never failed to annoy her, for Scarlett felt that the time for prayer had passed.

She prayed a good deal, for when Scarlett came into her room without knocking, she always found her on her knees by her bed.

Carreen had very little to say these days as she moved, delicate and wraithlike, about the tasks which were within her strength.

She would sit beside him through the long hot afternoons, fanning him and saying nothing.

Carreen liked him because of his placid and unembarrassed silences.

His convalescence was a long one and he lay quietly looking out of the window at the magnolias and causing very little trouble to anyone.

The day came when his pale blue eyes, perfectly cognizant of his surroundings, fell upon Carreen sitting beside him, telling her rosary beads, the morning sun shining through her f ...