ght off," he said,
greeting the editor's finery with a perceptible agitation and the editor
himself with a friendly shake of the hand. "Mildy says to wait out
here."

But immediately there was a faint rustling within the house: the swish
of draperies on the stairs, a delicious whispering when light feet
descend, tapping, to hearts that beat an answer, the telegraphic
message, "We come! We come! We are near! We are near!" Lige Willetts
stared at Harkless. He had never thought the latter good-looking until
he saw him step to the door to take Miss Sherwood's hand and say in a
strange, low, tense voice, "Good-morning," as if he were announcing, at
the least: "Every one in the world except us two, died last night. It is
a solemn thing, but I am very happy."

They walked, Minnie and Mr. Willetts a little distance in front of the
others. Harkless could not have told, afterward, whether they rode,
or walked, or floated on an air-ship to the court-house. All he knew
distinctly was that a divinity in a pink shirt waist, and a hat that was
woven of gauzy cloud by mocking fairies to make him stoop hideously to
see under it, dwelt for the time on earth and was at his side, dazzling
him in the morning sunshine. Last night the moon had lent her a silvery
glamour; she had something of the ethereal whiteness of night-dews in
that watery light, a nymph to laugh from a sparkling fountain, at the
moon or, as he thought, remembering her courtesy for his pretty speech,
perhaps a little lady of King Louis's court, wandering down the years
from Fontainebleau and appearing to clumsy mortals sometimes, of a June
night when the moon was in their heads.

But to-day she was of the clearest color, a pretty girl, whose gray eyes
twinkled to his in gay companionship. He marked how the sunshine was
spun into the fair shadows of her hair and seemed itself to catch a
lustre, rather than to impart it, and the light of the June day drifted
through the gauzy hat, touching her face with a delicate and tender
flush that came and went like the vibrating pink of early dawn. She
had the divinest straight nose, tip-tilted the faintest, most alluring
trifle, and a dimple cleft her chin, "the deadliest maelstrom in the
world!" He thrilled through and through. He had been only vaguely
conscious of the dimple in the night. It was not until he saw her by
daylight that he really knew it was there.

The village hummed with life before them. They walked through shimm