u--_ever!_" said Marcia fiercely. Strangely enough
the plain truth was bitter to the man to hear, although he had been
feeling it in his soul ever since they had discovered the flight of the
bride.

"Perhaps there was too much pressure brought to bear upon her," he said
lamely. "Looking back I can see times when she did not second me with
regard to hurrying the marriage, so warmly as I could have wished. I laid
it to her shyness. Yet she seemed happy when we met. Did you--did she--have
you any idea she had been planning this for long, or was it sudden?"

The words were out now, the thing he longed to know. It had been writing
its fiery way through his soul. Had she meant to torture him this way all
along, or was it the yielding to a sudden impulse that perhaps she had
already repented? He looked at Marcia with piteous, almost pleading eyes,
and her tortured young soul would have given anything to have been able to
tell him what he wanted to know. Yet she could not help him. She knew no
more than he. She steadied her own nerves and tried to tell all she knew
or surmised, tried her best to reveal Kate in her true character before
him. Not that she wished to speak ill of her sister, only that she would
be true and give this lover a chance to escape some of the pain if
possible, by seeing the real Kate as she was at home without varnish or
furbelows. Yet she reflected that those who knew Kate's shallowness well,
still loved her in spite of it, and always bowed to her wishes.

Gradually their talk subsided into deep silence once more, broken only by
the jog-trot of the horse or the stray note of some bird.

The road wound into the woods with its fragrant scents of hemlock, spruce
and wintergreen, and out into a broad, hot, sunny way.

The bees hummed in the flowers, and the grasshoppers sang hotly along the
side of the dusty road. Over the whole earth there seemed to be the sound
of a soft simmering, as if nature were boiling down her sweets, the better
to keep them during the winter.

The strain of the day's excitement and hurry and the weariness of sorrow
were beginning to tell upon the two travellers. The road was heavy with
dust and the horse plodded monotonously through it. With the drone of the
insects and the glare of the afternoon sun, it was not strange that little
by little a great drowsiness came over Marcia and her head began to droop
like a poor wilted flower until she was fast asleep.

David noticed that