ld run. Whether this
story were true or not, he was very shy of the girls, though the
dark-eyed Abigail exerted over him so strong an influence that, at the
early age of twenty he had asked her to be his wife, and she had
answered yes, while his mother sanctioned the match, for she had known
the Joneses in Vermont, and knew them for honest, thrifty people, whose
daughter would make a faithful, economical wife for any man. But death
came in to separate the lovers, and Abigail's cheeks grew redder still,
and her eyes were strangely bright as the fever burned in her veins,
until at last when the Indian-summer sun was shining down upon the
prairies, they buried her one day beneath the late summer flowers, and
the almost boy-widower wore upon his hat the band of crape which Ethelyn
remembered as looking so rusty when, the year following, he came to
Chicopee. Richard Markham believed that he had loved Abigail truly when
she died, but he knew now that she was not the one he would have chosen
in his mature manhood. She was suitable for him, perhaps, as he was when
he lost her, but not as he was now, and it was long since he had ceased
to visit her grave, or think of her with the feelings of sad regret
which used to come over him when, at night, he lay awake listening to
the moaning of the wind as it swept over the prairies, or watching the
glittering stars, and wondering if she had found a home beyond them with
Daisy, his only sister. There was nothing false about Richard Markham,
and when he stood with Ethelyn upon the shore of Pordunk Pond, and asked
her to be his wife, he told her of Abigail Jones, who had been two years
older than himself, and to whom he was once engaged.

"But I did not give her Daisy's ring," he said; and he spoke very
reverently as he continued, "Abigail was a good, sensible girl, and even
if she hears what I am saying she will pardon me when I tell you that it
did not seem to me that diamonds were befitting such as she; Daisy, I am
sure, had a different kind of person in view when she made me keep the
ring for the maiden who would prize such things, and who was worthy of
it. Abigail was worthy, but there was not a fitness in giving it to her,
neither would she have prized it; so I kept it in its little box with a
curl of Daisy's hair. Had she become my wife, I might eventually have
given it to her, but she died, and it was well. She would not have
satisfied me now, and I should--"

He was going to add