had allowed themselves to be seduced into attending the
obnoxious nuptials, and shedding the light of the family countenance
upon the ill-doing pair. Very austere and forbidding they looked as
they seated themselves, reprobatively, in a pew far removed from the
chancel, and their light was no better than the veriest darkness.

Twelve hours after the marriage had been published to the world,
another marked paper was speeding southward, addressed this time to
Pocahontas, and accompanied by a thick, closely written, letter.
Thorne had decided that it would be better to send a messenger before,
this time, to prepare the way for him. In his letter Thorne touched
but lightly on the point at issue between them, thinking it better to
take it for granted that her views had modified, if not changed. The
strength of his cause lay in his love, his loneliness, his yearning
need of her. On these themes he dwelt with all the eloquence of which
he was master, and the letter closed with a passionate appeal, in which
he poured out the long repressed fire of his love: "My darling, tell me
I may come to you--or rather tell me nothing; I will understand and
interpret your silence rightly. You are proud, my beautiful love, and
in all things I will spare you--in all things be gentle to you; in all
things, save this--I can not give you up--I _will_ not give you up. I
will wait here for another week, and if I do not hear from you, I will
start for Virginia at once--with joy and pride and enduring
thankfulness."

Pocahontas took the paper to her mother's room, the letter she put
quietly away. She would answer it, but not yet; at night--when the
house should be quiet she would answer it.

The lines containing the brief announcement were at the head of the
list:

MARRIED.

"CUMBERLAND-THORNE.--At the church of the Holy Trinity, September 21st,
18--, by the Rev. John Sylvestus, Cecil Cumberland to Ethel Ross
Thorne; both of this city."

Mrs. Mason laid the paper on the little stand beside her chair. "My
daughter," she said, looking up at the girl seriously, "this can make
no difference."

"No, mother," very quietly, "no difference; but I thought you ought to
know."

In her own room, at night, when the house was still, the girl sat with
the letter in her lap thinking. The moonlight poured in through the
open window and made a map on the floor, whereon slender shadows traced
rivers, mountains and boundaries. In the trees outs