just the look of his face when they came into the house that
summer evening, and he for the first time saw what she was, her cape
having fallen off, in the full lamplight. His kindly blue eyes widened
with shocked surprise, and fell; when he raised them, a pity like a
mother's had crept into them; it broadened and brightened as time slid
by, but it never left them.

So you see, after that, life unfolded in a burst of little surprises for
Asenath. If she came home very tired, some one said, "I am sorry." If
she wore a pink ribbon, she heard a whisper, "It suits you." If she
sang a little song, she knew that somebody listened.

"I did not know the world was like this!" cried the girl.

After a time there came a night that he chanced to be out late,--they
had planned an arithmetic lesson together, which he had forgotten,--and
she sat grieving by the kitchen fire.

"You missed me so much then?" he said regretfully, standing with his
hand upon her chair. She was trying to shell some corn; she dropped the
pan, and the yellow kernels rolled away on the floor.

"What should I have if I didn't have you?" she said, and caught her
breath.

The young man paced to the window and back again. The firelight touched
her shoulders, and the sad, white scar.

"You shall have me always, Asenath," he made answer. He took her face
within his hands and kissed it; and so they shelled the corn together,
and nothing more was said about it.

He had spoken this last spring of their marriage; but the girl, like all
girls, was shyly silent, and he had not urged it.

Asenath started from her pleasant dreaming just as the oriflamme was
furling into gray, suddenly conscious that she was not alone. Below her,
quite on the brink of the water, a girl was sitting,--a girl with a
bright plaid shawl, and a nodding red feather in her hat. Her head was
bent, and her hair fell against a profile cut in pink-and-white.

"Del is too pretty to be here alone so late," thought Asenath, smiling
tenderly. Good-natured Del was kind to her in a certain way, and she
rather loved the girl. She rose to speak to her, but concluded, on a
second glance through the aspens, that Miss Ivory was quite able to take
care of herself.

Del was sitting on an old log that jutted into the stream, dabbling in
the water with the tips of her feet. (Had she lived on The Avenue she
could not have been more particular about her shoemaker.) Some one--it
was too dark to see distinctl