s to a friend, and in giving him their confidence and affection
awakened his own.

Above all Pepeeta was ever near him. It was no wonder that her beauty
threw its spell over David's spirit. It had been enhanced by sorrow, for
the human countenance, like the landscape, requires shadow as well as
sunshine to perfect its charms. But the burst of sunshine which had come
with David's return had brought it a final consummation which
transfigured even the Quaker dress she had adopted. Her bonnet would
never stay over her face but fell back on her shoulders, her animated
countenance emerging from this envelope like the bud of a rose from its
sheath. She was as a butterfly at that critical instant when it is ready
to leave its chrysalis and take wing. She was a soul enmeshed in an
ethereal body, rather than a body which ensheathed a soul.

Quietly and sedately the lovers met each other at the table, or at the
spring, or at the milking.

And when the labors of the day had ended, they sat beneath the spreading
hackberry trees, or wandered through the garden, or down the winding
lane to the meadow, and reviewed the past with sadness or looked forward
to the future with a chastened joy. Their spirits were subdued and
softened, their love took on a holy rather than a passionate cast, they
felt themselves beneath the shadow of an awful crime, and again and
again when they grew joyous and almost gay they were checked by the
irrepressible apprehension that out from under the silently revolving
wheels of judgment some other punishment would roll.

Tenderly as they loved each other, and sweet as was that love, they
could not always be happy with such a past behind them! In proportion to
the soul's real grandeur it must suffer over its own imperfections. This
suffering is remorse. In proud and gloomy hearts which tell their
secrets only to their own pillows, its tears are poison and its rebukes
the thrust of daggers. But in those which, like theirs, are gentle and
tender by nature, remorseful tears are drops of penitential dew. David
and Pepeeta suffered, but their suffering was curative, for pure love is
like a fountain; by its incessant gushing from the heart it clarifies
the most turbid streams of thought or emotion. Each week witnessed a
perceptible advance in peace, in rest, in quiet happiness, and at last
the night of their marriage arrived, and they went together to the
meeting house.

The people gathered as they did at that ot