in
her father's study with only the necessary witnesses and no guests.
Eugene Hautville had chafed. Dorothy also, with her feminine desire
for all minor details of happiness, was aggrieved that she could
never now appear before the public gaze in all the splendor of her
wedding-gear. But Parson Fair stood firm for once, and would have it
so.

All the watchful neighbors saw was, after nightfall and moonrise,
Parson Fair's door open, and the bride and groom appear for a second
in a golden shaft of light which flashed into gloom at the closing of
the door, and left there two shadows, as if the story of their life
and love had already been told and passed into history. And then the
neighbors saw them move up the road with long vanishing flutters of
the bride's white draperies, and the great black woman, steadying a
basket against her hip, in their wake, following her mistress like a
faithful dog, with perhaps the most unselfish love of all.

The black woman favored Eugene more than she had ever favored Burr,
perhaps because she was a true slave of love, and leaned with the
secret leanings of her mistress's heart against all words of mouth,
obeying her commands with a fuller understanding of them than Dorothy
herself.

When this new lover came a-courting, the African woman had always
greeted him at the door with that wide, sudden smile of hers, at once
simple, like a child's, and wild, like the grin of an animal; and her
voice, in her thick jargon, was nearly as softly rich to him as to
Dorothy. Moreover she kept no longer jealous watch at the door of the
room where the lovers sat, and was fond of treating the young man
with little cakes which she made with honey, whose like was to be
eaten nowhere else in the village.

After Dorothy and Eugene were wedded they faded into comparative
insignificance in the thoughts of the villagers, which were then
centred upon Burr Gordon and Madelon. The curtain went down upon
Eugene and his bride as upon any pair of wedded lovers in his
Shakespeare book.

Burr was in exceedingly ill repute, but he did not himself know it.
Many of his old friends treated him coolly, but he attributed that to
the embarrassed sympathy and constraint which they naturally felt
towards him in his position. He thought they avoided him because they
knew well that he would suspect even friendliness lest it contain a
pity which would hurt his pride; and he thanked them for it. But the
truth was, that outcry