oman set her pail down and clutched him by both hands.
"Say you are not married," she demanded; "say it, swear it!"

"Yes, I do swear it," said David. "You are the only woman I ever asked
to marry me. I can support you. We sha'n't be rolling in riches, but we
can be comfortable, and--I rather guess I can make you happy."

"You didn't say what your name was," said the woman.

"David Anderson."

The woman looked at him with a strange expression, the expression of
one who loves and respects, even reveres, the isolation and secrecy
of another soul. She understood, down to the depths of her being she
understood. She had lived a hard life, she had her faults, but she was
fine enough to comprehend and hold sacred another personality. She was
very pale, but she smiled. Then she turned to go.

"How long will it take you?" asked David.

"About an hour."

"All right. I will meet you in front of the parson's house in an hour.
We will go back by train. I have money enough."

"I'd just as soon walk." The woman spoke with the utmost humility of
love and trust. She had not even asked where the man lived. All her life
she had followed him with her soul, and it would go hard if her poor
feet could not keep pace with her soul.

"No, it is too far; we will take the train. One goes at half past four."

At half past four the couple, made man and wife, were on the train
speeding toward the little home in the woods. The woman had frizzled her
thin hair pathetically and ridiculously over her temples; on her left
hand gleamed a white diamond. She had kept it hidden; she had almost
starved rather than part with it. She gazed out of the window at the
flying landscape, and her thin lips were curved in a charming smile. The
man sat beside her, staring straight ahead as if at happy visions.

They lived together afterward in the little house in the woods, and were
happy with a strange crystallized happiness at which they would have
mocked in their youth, but which they now recognized as the essential of
all happiness upon earth. And always the woman knew what she knew about
her husband, and the man knew about his wife, and each recognized the
other as old lover and sweetheart come together at last, but always
each kept the knowledge from the other with an infinite tenderness
of delicacy which was as a perfumed garment veiling the innermost
sacredness of love.

THE BALKING OF CHRISTOPHER

THE spring was early that year. It was only