Then Barclay
added: "You get the music and take it down to Jane, and tell her to
teach me, and I'll be there. Jane says you're going to put old Watts
through all the gaits."

He leaned back in his swivel chair and smiled at his visitor. He had a
slow drawl that he used in teasing, and one who heard that voice and
afterward heard the harsh bark of the man in driving a bargain or
browbeating an adversary would have to look twice to realize that the
same man was talking. A little over an hour before in that very room
he had looked at Bob Hendricks from under wrinkled brows with the
vertical line creased between his eyes and snarled, "Well, then, if
you think she's going to marry that fellow because I got him to lend
the colonel some money, why don't you go and lend the colonel some
more money and get her back?"

But there was not a muscle twitching in his face as he talked to
Nellie Logan, not a break in his voice, not a ruffle of a hair, to
tell her that John Barclay had broken with the friend of his boyhood
and the partner of his youth, and that he had closed and bolted the
Door of Hope on Molly Culpepper. He drawled on: "Jane was saying that
you were going to have Bob and Molly for best man and bridesmaid.
Ought you to do that? You know they--"

He did not finish the sentence, but she replied: "Oh, yes, I know
about that. I told Watts he ought to have Mr. Brownwell; but he's as
stubborn as a mule about just that one thing. Everything else--the
flower girls and the procession and the ring service and all--he's so
nice about. And you know I just had to have Molly."

John slapped the arms of his chair and laughed. "As old Daddy Mason
says, 'Now hain't that just like a woman!' Well, Nellie, it's your
wedding, and a woman is generally not married more than once, so it's
all right. Go it while you're young."

And so he teased her out of the room, and when Sycamore Ridge packed
itself into the Congregational Church one June night, to witness the
most gorgeous church wedding the town ever had seen, John opened the
ceremonies by singing the "Voice that breathed o'er Eden" most
effectively, and Sycamore Ridge in its best clothes, rather stuffed
and uncomfortable thereby, was in that unnatural attitude toward the
world where it thought John Barclay's voice, a throaty baritone, with
much affectation in the middle register, a tendency to flat in the
upper register, and thick fuzz below "C," was beautiful, though John
often re