man is fool enough to believe it, why undeceive him? And if he is so
sure of it, may it even not be so? Selma was content to have it so,
especially as the assertion did not jar with her own prepossessions; and
thus they rode home in the summer night in the mutual contentment of a
betrothal.

CHAPTER II.

The match was thoroughly agreeable to Mrs. Farley, Selma's aunt and
nearest relation, who with her husband presided over a flourishing
poultry farm in Wilton. She was an easy-going, friendly spirit, with a
sharp but not wide vision, who did not believe that a likelier fellow
than Lewis Babcock would come wooing were her niece to wait a lifetime.
He was hearty, comical, and generous, and was said to be making money
fast in the varnish business. In short, he seemed to her an admirable
young man, with a stock of common-sense and high spirits eminently
serviceable for a domestic venture. How full of fun he was, to be sure!
It did her good to behold the tribute his appetite paid to the buckwheat
cakes with cream and other tempting viands she set before him--a
pleasing contrast to Selma's starveling diet--and the hearty smack with
which he enforced his demands upon her own cheeks as his mother-in-law
apparent, argued an affectionate disposition. Burly, rosy-cheeked,
good-natured, was he not the very man to dispel her niece's vagaries and
turn the girl's morbid cleverness into healthy channels?

Selma, therefore, found nothing but encouragement in her choice at home;
so by the end of another three months they were made man and wife, and
had moved into that little house in Benham which had attracted Babcock's
eye. Benham, as has been indicated, was in the throes of bustle and
self-improvement. Before the war it had been essentially unimportant.
But the building of a railroad through the town and the discovery of oil
wells in its neighborhood had transformed it in a twinkling into an
active and spirited centre. Selma's new house was on the edge of the
city, in the van of real estate progress, one of a row of small but
ambitious-looking dwellings, over the dark yellow clapboards of which
the architect had let his imagination run rampant in scrolls and
flourishes. There was fancy colored glass in a sort of rose-window over
the front door, and lozenges of fancy glass here and there in the
facade. Each house had a little grass-plot, which Babcock in his case
had made appurtenant to a metal stag, which seemed to him the fin