ye'd ha known more 'n yer do;" and with this characteristically
masculine shifting of his premises, Mike turned his back on Norah.

Neither Hetty nor Doctor Eben had ever heard that lovers should not
wed in May; and, as they looked up at the great fragrant pink and white
boughs on the walls, Hetty exclaimed: "Nobody ought to be married except
when apple-trees are in bloom. Nothing else could have been half so
lovely in the rooms, and the fire-light makes them all the prettier.
What a genius Sally has for arranging flowers. Who would have thought
common stone jars could look so well?"

Sally had taken the largest sized gray stone jars she could buy in
Welbury, and in these had set boughs six and seven feet long, looking
like young trees. On the walls she had placed deep wooden boxes with
shield-shaped fronts; these fronts were covered with gray lichens from
the rocks; the rosy blossoms waved from out these boxes, looking as much
at home as they did above the lichen-covered trunks of the trees in the
orchard.

"Poor dear Sally!" Hetty continued, "she had a hard time the first part
of the evening. That stony old woman wouldn't speak to her. But I took
her in hand afterward. Did you observe?"

"Observe!" shouted Dr. Eben. "I should think so. You hardly waited till
the minister had got through with us."

"I didn't wait till then," replied Hetty, demurely. "I was planning it
all the while he was telling me about my duty to you. I didn't believe
he could tell me much about that, anyway; and the duty that weighed on
my mind most at that minute was my duty to Sally."

And thus, in the flickering fire-light and the apple-blossom fragrance,
the two wedded lovers sat talking and dreaming, and taking joy of each
other while the night wore on. There was no violent transition, no great
change of atmosphere, in the beginnings of their wedded life. Dr. Eben
had now lived so much at "Gunn's," that it seemed no strange thing for
him to live there altogether. If it chafed him sometimes that it was
Hetty's house and not his, Hetty's estate, Hetty's right and rule, he
never betrayed it. And there was little reason that it should chafe him;
for, from the day of Hetty Gunn's marriage, she was a changed woman in
the habits and motives of her whole life. The farm was to her, as if it
were not. All the currents of her being were set now in a new channel,
and flowed as impetuously there as they had been wont to flow in the old
ones. Her hus