imaginings of his
home had never been anything like this reality, and for a moment she
felt as if in a kind of horrible nightmare, from which she struggled
to awake.

"Oh! if it were only a dream," she thought; but it was no dream, though
as Richard himself lifted her carefully from the wagon, and deposited
her upon the side stoop, there came a mist before her eyes, and for an
instant sense and feeling forsook her; but only for an instant, for the
hall door was thrown open, and Richard's mother came out to greet her
son and welcome her new daughter.

But alas for Ethelyn's visions of heavy silk and costly lace! How they
vanished before this woman in purple calico, with ruffles of the same
standing up about the throat, and the cotton lace coiffure upon her
head! She was very glad to see her boy and wound both her arms around
his neck, but she was afraid of Ethelyn. She, too, had had her ideal,
but it was not like this proud-looking beauty, dressed so stylishly,
and, as it seemed to her so extravagantly, with her long, full skirt of
handsome poplin trailing so far behind her, and her basque fitting her
graceful figure so admirably. Neither did the hat, rolled so jauntily on
the sides, and giving her a coquettish appearance, escape her notice,
nor the fact that the dotted veil was not removed from the white face,
even after Richard had put the little, plump hand in hers, and said:

"This, mother, is Ethie, my wife. I hope you will love each other for my
sake."

In her joy at seeing her pet boy again, Mrs. Markham would have done a
great deal for his sake, but she could not "kiss a veil," as she
afterwards said to Melinda Jones, when she reached the point where she
talked straight out about her daughter-in-law. No, she could not kiss a
veil, and so she only held and pressed Ethelyn's hand, and leading her
into the house, told her she was very welcome, and bade her come to the
fire and take off her things, and asked if she was not tired, and cold
and hungry.

And Ethelyn tried to answer, but the great lumps were swelling in her
throat, and so keen a pain was tugging at her heart that when at last,
astonished at her silence, Richard said, "What is the matter, Ethie--why
don't you answer mother?" she burst out in a pitiful cry:

"Oh, Richard, I can't, I can't; please take me back to Aunt Barbara."

This was the crisis, the concentration of all she had been suffering for
the last hour, and it touched Mrs. Markham's hear