his daughter would
naturally inherit from him, she already possessed more than her lover,
at the time of their betrothal. This in the eyes of one class was a
sufficient reason for the father's hostility. When low natures live
(as they almost invariably do) wholly in the present, they neither
take tenderness from the past nor warning from the possibilities of the
future. It is the exceptional men and women who remember their youth.
So, these lovers received a nearly equal amount of sympathy and
condemnation; and only slowly, partly through their quiet fidelity and
patience, and partly through the improvement in John Vincent's
worldly circumstances, was the balance changed. Old Reuben remained an
unflinching despot to the last: if any relenting softness touched his
heart, he sternly concealed it; and such inference as could be drawn
from the fact that he, certainly knowing what would follow his death,
bequeathed his daughter her proper share of his goods, was all that
could be taken for consent.

They were married: John, a grave man in middle age, weather-beaten
and worn by years of hard work and self-denial, yet not beyond the
restoration of a milder second youth; and Phebe a sad, weary woman,
whose warmth of longing had been exhausted, from whom youth and its
uncalculating surrenders of hope and feeling had gone forever. They
began their wedded life under the shadow of the death out of which
it grew; and when, after a ceremony in which neither bridesmaid nor
groomsman stood by their side, they united their divided homes, it
seemed to their neighbors that a separated husband and wife had come
together again, not that the relation was new to either.

John Vincent loved his wife with the tenderness of an innocent man,
but all his tenderness could not avail to lift the weight of settled
melancholy which had gathered upon her. Disappointment, waiting,
yearning, indulgence in long lament and self-pity, the morbid
cultivation of unhappy fancies--all this had wrought its work upon her,
and it was too late to effect a cure. In the night she awoke to weep at
his side, because of the years when she had awakened to weep alone;
by day she kept up her old habit of foreboding, although the evening
steadily refuted the morning; and there were times when, without any
apparent cause, she would fall into a dark, despairing mood which her
husband's greatest care and cunning could only slowly dispel.

Two or three years passed, and new