g in the distant meadow; the sun glimmered on
something that might have been a long reed quivering.

"An old friend fishing yonder," he said, quietly; "I knew he would be
there." He touched her and pointed to the distant figure. "That is the
parson of Foxville," he said. "We will need him before we go to London."

She looked across the purple fields of iris. Suddenly his meaning
flashed out like a sunbeam.

"Do--do you wish--that--_now_?" she faltered.

He picked up the paddle; she caught his hand, trembling.

"No, no!"--she whispered, with bent head--"I cannot; don't take me
so--so quickly. Truly we must be mad to think of it."

He held the paddle poised; after a while her hand slid from the blade
and she looked up into his eyes. The canoe moved on.

"Oh, we are quite mad," she said, unsteadily.

"I am glad we are," he said.

The mellow dip! dip! of the paddle woke the drowsing red-winged
blackbirds from the reeds; the gray snipe wheeled out across the marsh
in flickering flight.

The aged parson of Foxville, intent on his bobbing cork, looked up in
mild surprise to see a canoe, heavily hung with water-lilies, glide into
his pool and swing shoreward.

The parson of Foxville was a very old man--almost too old to fish for
trout.

Crawford led him a pace aside, leaving Miss Castle, somewhat frightened,
knee-deep in the purple iris.

Then the old parson came toddling to her and took her hand, and peered
at her with his aged eyes, saying, "You are quite mad, my child, and
very lovely, and very, very young. So I think, after all, you would be
much safer if you were married."

Somebody encircled her waist; she turned and looked into the eyes of her
lover, and still looking at him, she laid her hands in his.

A wedding amid the iris, all gray with the hovering, misty wings of
moths--that was her fate--with the sky a canopy of fire above her, and
the curlew calling through the kindling dusk, and the blue processional
of the woods lining the corridors of the coming night.

And at last the aged parson kissed her and shook hands with her husband
and shambled away across the meadows.

Slowly northward through the dusk stole the canoe once more, bearing the
bride of an hour, her head on her husband's knees. The stars came out to
watch them; a necklace of bubbles trailed in the paddle's wake,
stringing away, twinkling in the starlight.

Slowly through the perfumed gloom they glided, her warm head on his
knees,