ast her. "I see her coming now across the field," he
said; "she has seen you and will be here presently."

Then he bade her enter, and made way for her, like a courtier for a
princess, and seated her in the north parlor in the best
rocking-chair, as if it were a throne. Then he sat down opposite her,
with his Shakespeare book still on his knees. That morning he had
been poring over "Romeo and Juliet." His imagination was afire with
the sweet ardor of that other lover, and he would gladly have
identified Dorothy, as she sat there, with Juliet; and so he adored
her doubly.

Yet he saw only the tip of her little shoe below the blue hem of her
gown, and dared not fairly glance at her face, although he bore
himself with such calm ease that none could have suspected.

"It is a beautiful day," said Eugene.

"Yes," whispered Dorothy. Somehow for the moment Eugene forgot
Dorothy's marriage, and Burr and his bitter jealousy, for suddenly a
strange and unwarrantable sense of possession came over him. He
looked fully at Dorothy, and scanned her drooping face, and smiled,
and then Madelon came in.

Dorothy arose at once and greeted her with more of her usual manner.
Then she fumbled uneasily with a little parcel she held, and glanced
at Eugene, and then at Madelon. "I had an errand--" began Dorothy and
stopped, and then Eugene said softly, still smiling, "I see you have
some weighty matter to discuss," and bowed himself out with his
Shakespeare book.

Then Dorothy, all trembling, and before he was fairly out of hearing
across the entry in the other room, announced her errand. She had
come to beg Madelon, whose rare skill in embroidering her own floral
designs was celebrated in the village, to work for her the front
breadth of one of her silken gowns with a garland of red roses. "I
can work only from patterns which are marked out," said Dorothy; and
then she held up a shining length of green silk upon which the
garland already bloomed in her pretty feminine fancy. "I will pay you
whatever you ask," said Dorothy, further. Then she started and
shrank, for Madelon looked at her with such wrath and pride in her
black eyes that she was frightened.

"What--have--I--done?" she faltered, piteously. And it was quite true
that she did not know what she had done, for she reasoned always like
a child, with premises of acts only and not of motives. She
considered simply that Madelon had urged her to be true to Burr, and
was herself to