ghter robes, now
fairly white with much working. I drew it toward me, and with her still
leaning against my shoulder, I took up a charred stick, and so,
laboriously, I wrote upon the surface of the hide, these words of our
covenant:

"_I, John Cowles, take thee, Ellen Meriwether, to be my lawful, wedded
wife, in sickness, and in health, for better of for worse, till death do
us part._"

And I signed it; and made a seal after my name.

"Write," said I to her. "Write as I have written."

She took a fresh brand, blackened at the end, and in lesser characters
wrote slowly, letter by letter:

"_I, Ellen Meriwether, take thee, John Cowles, to be my lawful, wedded
husband_--" She paused, but I would not urge her, and it was moments
before she resumed--"_in sickness and in health, for better or for
worse_--" Again she paused, thinking, thinking--and so concluded, "_till
death do us part_."

"It means," she said to me, simply as a child, "until we have both gone
back into the flowers and the trees."

I took her hand in mine. Mayhap book and bell and organ peal and
vestured choir and high ceremony of the church may be more solemn; but
I, who speak the truth from this very knowledge, think it could not be.

"When you have signed that, Ellen," I said to her at last, "we two are
man and wife, now and forever, here and any place in the world. That is
a binding ceremony, and it endows you with your share of all my
property, small or large as that may be. It is a legal wedding, and it
holds us with all the powers the law can have. It is a contract."

"Do not talk to me of contracts," she said. "I am thinking of nothing
but our--wedding."

Still mystical, still enigma, still woman, she would have it that the
stars, the mountains---the witnesses--and not ourselves, made the
wedding. I left it so, sure of nothing so much as that, whatever her way
of thought might be, it was better than my own.

"But if I do not sign this?" she asked at length.

"Then we are not married."

She sighed and laid down the pen. "Then I shall not sign it--yet," she
said.

I caught up her hand as though I would write for her.

"No," she said, "it shall be only our engagement, our troth between us.
This will be our way. I have not yet been sufficiently wooed, John
Cowles!"

I looked into her eyes and it seemed to me I saw there something of the
same light I had seen when she was the masked coquette of the Army
ball--the yearning, the melancho