widow
unseen. The windows, as he went down the side of the building, he noted
to be high, but not too high to be reached by a skillful, noiseless
climber. In the back of the house he saw the kitchen door, illumined
indeed, but the room, as far as he could see, empty.

Then very suddenly a wave of silence began somewhere in a side of the
house and swept across it, dying to a murmur at the edges. Barry waited
for no more maneuvers, but walked boldly up the back stairs and entered
the house, hat in hand.

The moment he passed the door he was alert, balanced. He could have
swung to either side, or whirled and shot behind him with the precision
of a leisurely marksman, and as he walked he smiled, happily with his
head held high. He seemed so young, then, that one would have said he
had just come in gaily from some game with the other youths of Alder.

Out of the kitchen he passed into the hall, and there he understood the
meaning of the silence, for both the doors to the front room were open,
and through the doors he heard a single voice, deep and solemn, and
through the doors he saw the crowd standing motionless. Their heads did
not stir,--heads on which the hair was plastered smoothly down--and when
some one raised a hand to touch an itching ear, or nose, he moved his
arm with such caution that it seemed he feared to set a magazine of
powder on fire. All their backs were towards Barry, where he stood in
the hall, and as he glided toward them, he heard the deep voice stop,
and then the trembling voice of a girl speak in reply.

At the first entrance he paused, for the whole scene unrolled before
him. It was a wedding. Just in front of him, on chairs and even on
benches, sat the majority of adult Alder,--facing these stood the
wedding pair with the minister just in front of them. He could see the
girl to one side of the minister's back, and she was very pretty, very
femininely appealing, now, in a dress which was a cloudy effect of
white; but Barry gave her only one sharp glance. His attention was for
the men of the crowd. And although there were only backs of heads, and
side glimpses of faces he hunted swiftly for Vic Gregg.

But Gregg was not there. He surveyed the assembly twice, incredulous,
for surely the tall man should be here, but when he was on the very
point of turning on his heel and slinking down the hall to pursue his
hunt in other quarters, the voice of the minister stopped, and the deep
tone of Vic himse