l that time the gossips were cheated out of the sight of
her, and her father was constrained to treat her with a sort of
conscience-stricken tenderness, in spite of her grave fault. Her
mother had never risen from a fever which seemed akin to this; and
Dorothy, in spite of his stern Puritan creed, was yet dearer to him
than that abstraction of her which he deemed her soul.

Looking at the girl, flushed softly with fever, her blue eyes shining
like jewels, as she lay in her white nest, he knew that he loved her
life more fiercely than he judged her sins. He would turn his back
upon her and go out of her chamber, his black height bowed like a
penitent, and down to his study, and wrestle there upon his knees for
hours with that earthly and natural love which he accounted as of the
Tempter, yet might after all have been an angel, and of the Lord. And
when Dorothy came weakly down-stairs at last, with the great black
woman guarding her steps as if she were a baby, he found not in
himself the power of stern counsel and reproof which he had decided
upon when she should have left her chamber.

All the neighbors knew when Dorothy Fair first stepped her foot out
of doors, and told one another suspiciously that she did not look
very sick, and that they guessed she might have come out sooner, and
gone to meeting, had she been so minded.

And in truth the girl, beyond slight deflections in the curves of her
soft cheeks, and a wistful enlarging and brightening of her blue
eyes, as in thoughtful shadows, was not much changed. The first
Sunday when she appeared in the meeting-house she wore, to the
delight and scandal of the women, one of the new gowns and hats of
her bridal outfit. Dorothy Fair, in a great plumed hat of peach-blow
silk, in a pearly silk gown and pink-silk mitts, in a white-muslin
pelerine all wrought with cunning needlework, sat in the parson's
pew, and uplifted her lovely face towards her father in the pulpit,
and nobody knew how her whole mind and fancy were set, not upon the
sermon, but upon Eugene Hautville in the singing-seats behind her.
And nobody dreamed how, as she sat there, she held before her face,
as it were, a sort of mental hand-mirror, in which she could see her
head of fair curls, her peach-blow hat, and her slender white-muslin
shoulders reflected from Eugene's dark eyes. The fall of every curl
had she studied well that morning, and the folds of the muslin
pelerine over her shoulders. And when the