nd showed at the throat her finely wrought lace
kerchief. The sun was so warm that she had put on her white straw hat
with blue ribbons, and her soft curls flowed from under it to her
blue belt ribbon. She wore, too, her little black-silk apron,
cunningly worked in the corners with flowers in colored silks.
Dorothy looked up in Eugene Hautville's face, and he looked down at
her, for a force against which they had come into the world unarmed
constrained them. Then she bent her head before him until he could
see nothing but the white slant of her hat, and caught at her silk
apron as if she would hide her face with that also.

Eugene stood still looking at her, his face radiant and glowing red.
"Dorothy!" he stammered, and then Dorothy straightened herself
suddenly, though she kept her face averted, flung up her head, caught
up her blue skirts again, and made as if she would pass on without
another word. Eugene, with his face all at once white, and his head
proudly raise, stood aside to let her pass. "'Tis a warm day for the
season," he said, with his old graceful courtesy. But Dorothy looked
up at him again as she neared him in passing, and her sweet mouth was
quivering like a frightened baby's, and the tears were in her blue
eyes, and no man who loved her could have let her go by; and
certainly not this fiery young Eugene. Suddenly, and with seemingly
no more involvement of wills or ethics than the alders in their
blossoming, the two were in each other's arms, and their lips were
meeting in kisses.

This fair and demure daughter of Puritans might well, as she stood
there in her lover's embrace, being already, as she was, the
betrothed bride of another, have been accounted fickle and false, but
perhaps in a sense she was not. Never had she forgot or been untrue
to her first love-dreams, which Eugene had caused, but had held to
them with that mild negative obstinacy of her nature which she could
not herself overcome. Now it was to her as if she were reconciled to
her true lover, and was faithful instead of false; and less false she
surely was to her own self.

Right contentedly had she loved for a time Burr's love for her and
his tenderness, and had been stirred thereby to passion, but now she
loved this other man for something better than her own sweet image in
his eyes.

Never a word she said, but her hat slipped down on her shoulders,
hanging by its blue strings, and she let her head lie on Eugene's
shoulder, with