m?"

I answered this question and a number of others, backward and forward,
until she had led me to cover the whole incident about twice-and-a-half
times. Then she had a silence, and after this a reflection.

"How well they managed it!"

"Managed what?"

"The accepted version."

"Oh, yes, indeed!"

"And you and I will not spoil it for them," she declared.

As I took my final leave of her she put a flower in my buttonhole. My
reflection was then, and is now, that if she already knew the truth from
John himself, how well she managed it!

So that same night I took the lugubrious train which bore me with the
grossest deliberation to the mountains; and among the mountains and
their waterfalls I stayed and saw the rhododendrons, and was preparing
to journey home when the invitation came from John and Eliza.

I have already said that of this wedding no word was in the papers.
Kings Port by the war lost all material things, but not the others,
among which precious privacy remains to her; and, O Kings Port, may
you never lose your grasp of that treasure! May you never know the land
where the reporter blooms, where if any joy or grief befall you, the
public press rings your doorbell and demands the particulars, and if you
deny it the particulars, it makes them up and says something scurrilous
about you into the bargain. Therefore nothing was printed, morning
or evening, about John and Eliza. Nor was the wedding service held in
church to the accompaniment of nodding bonnets and gaping stragglers. No
eye not tender with regard and emotion looked on while John took Eliza
to his wedded wife, to live together after God's ordinance in the holy
state of matrimony.

In Royal Street, not many steps from South Place, there stands a quiet
house a little back, upon whose face sorrow has struck many blows, but
made no deep wounds yet; no scorch from the fires of war is visible,
and the rending of the earthquake does not show too plainly; but there
hangs about the house a gravity that comes from seeing and suffering
much, and a sweetness from having sheltered many generations of smiles
and tears. The long linked chain of births and deaths here has not been
broken and scattered, and the grandchildren look out of the same windows
from which the grandsires gazed, whose faces now in picture frames still
watch serenely the sad present from their happy past. Therefore the
rooms lie in still depths of association, and from the walls, the