lization as he imagined would ever exist, to her belief,
anywhere. She took the world as she found it, and made the best of it.
She trusted in Fulkerson; she had proved his magnanimity in a serious
emergency; and in small things she was willing fearlessly to chance it
with him. She was not a sentimentalist, and there was nothing fantastic
in her expectations; she was a girl of good sense and right mind, and
she liked the immediate practicality as well as the final honor of
Fulkerson. She did not idealize him, but in the highest effect she
realized him; she did him justice, and she would not have believed
that she did him more than justice if she had sometimes known him to do
himself less.

Their engagement was a fact to which the Leighton household adjusted
itself almost as simply as the lovers themselves; Miss Woodburn told the
ladies at once, and it was not a thing that Fulkerson could keep from
March very long. He sent word of it to Mrs. March by her husband;
and his engagement perhaps did more than anything else to confirm the
confidence in him which had been shaken by his early behavior in the
Lindau episode, and not wholly restored by his tardy fidelity to March.
But now she felt that a man who wished to get married so obviously and
entirely for love was full of all kinds of the best instincts, and only
needed the guidance of a wife, to become very noble. She interested
herself intensely in balancing the respective merits of the engaged
couple, and after her call upon Miss Woodburn in her new character she
prided herself upon recognizing the worth of some strictly Southern
qualities in her, while maintaining the general average of New England
superiority. She could not reconcile herself to the Virginian custom
illustrated in her having been christened with the surname of Madison;
and she said that its pet form of Mad, which Fulkerson promptly
invented, only made it more ridiculous.

Fulkerson was slower in telling Beaton. He was afraid, somehow, of
Beaton's taking the matter in the cynical way; Miss Woodburn said she
would break off the engagement if Beaton was left to guess it or find
it out by accident, and then Fulkerson plucked up his courage. Beaton
received the news with gravity, and with a sort of melancholy meekness
that strongly moved Fulkerson's sympathy, and made him wish that Beaton
was engaged, too.

It made Beaton feel very old; it somehow left him behind and
forgotten; in a manner, it made him fe