d in search of a bite of tender grass.

What could it mean? And why did Marcia occupy that place beside the
stranger, obviously the bridegroom? Was she going on a visit? He had heard
of no such plan. Where was her sister? Would there be another coach
presently, and was this man then not the bridegroom but merely a friend of
the family? Of course, that must be it. He got up and staggered to the
fence to look down the road, but no one came by save the jogging old gray
and carryall, with Aunt Polly grim and offended and Uncle Joab meek and
depressed beside her. Could he have missed the bridal carriage when he was
at the other end of the lot? Could they have gone another way? He had a
half a mind to call to Uncle Joab to enquire only he was a timid boy and
shrank back until it was too late.

But why had Marcia as she rode away wafted that strange farewell that had
in it the familiarity of the final? And why did he feel so strange and
weak in his knees?

Marcia was to help his mother next week at the quilting bee. She had not
gone away to stay, of course. He got up and tried to whistle and turn the
furrows evenly as before, but his heart was heavy, and, try as he would,
he could not understand the feeling that kept telling him Marcia was gone
out of his life forever.

At last his day's work was done and he could hasten to the house. Without
waiting for his supper, he "slicked up," as he called it, and went at once
to the village, where he learned the bitter truth.

It was Mary Ann who told him.

Mary Ann, the plain, the awkward, who secretly admired Hanford Weston as
she might have admired an angel, and who as little expected him to speak
to her as if he had been one. Mary Ann stood by her front gate in the dusk
of the summer evening, the halo of her unusual wedding finery upon her,
for she had taken advantage of being dressed up to make two or three
visits since the wedding, and so prolong the holiday. The light of the
sunset softened her plain features, and gave her a gentler look than was
her wont. Was it that, and an air of lonesomeness akin to his own, that
made Hanford stop and speak to her?

And then she told him. She could not keep it in long. It was the wonder of
her life, and it filled her so that her thought had no room for anything
else. To think of Marcia taken in a day, gone from their midst forever,
gone to be a grown-up woman in a new world! It was as strange as sudden
death, and almost as terrible and