pon her the desire to be much alone, to avoid noises
and bustle--it irritated her. She found herself thinking more and more
of her father, her father to whom she had never written one line
since she had left the North. She had had good reasons for not
writing--writing could do no good whatever, particularly to a man who
could not read, and who would not have understood her new life if he
had read. Yet now she seemed not to know why she had not written, and to
blame herself for neglect and forgetfulness. It weighed on her. Why had
she ever been taken from the place of tamarack-trees and the sweeping
prairie grass? No, no, she was not, after all, fit for this life. She
had been mistaken, and Richard had been mistaken--Richard, who was
so wise. The London season? Ah! that was because people had found a
novelty, and herself of better manners than had been expected.

The house was now full of preparations for the wedding. It stared her in
the face every day, almost every hour. Dressmakers, milliners, tailors,
and all those other necessary people. Did the others think what all this
meant to her? It was impossible that they should. When Marion came back
from town at night and told of her trials among the dressmakers, when
she asked the general opinion and sometimes individual judgment, she
could not know that it was at the expense of Lali's nerves.

Lali, when she married, had changed her moccasins, combed her hair, and
put on a fine red belt, and that was all. She was not envious now, not
at all. But somehow it all was a deadly kind of evidence against herself
and her marriage. Her reproach was public, the world knew it, and no
woman can forgive a public shame, even was it brought about by a man she
loved, or loves. Her chiefest property in life is her self-esteem and
her name before the world. Rob her of these, and her heaven has fallen,
and if a man has shifted the foundations of her peace, there is no
forgiveness for him till her Paradise has been reconquered. So busy were
all the others that they did not see how her strength was failing. There
were three weeks between the day the banns were announced and the day of
the wedding, which was to be in the village church, not in town; for, as
Marion said, she had seen too many marriages for one day's triumph and
criticism; she wanted hers where there would be neither triumph nor
criticism, but among people who had known her from her childhood up. A
happy romance had raised Mari