think that would be ahead of all ways to get married
I have seen."

He paused again, and she made no rejoinder.

"But we have left out your mother."

She looked in his face with quick astonishment. It was as if his spirit
had heard the cry of her spirit.

"That is nowhere near right," he said. "That is wrong."

"She could never have come here," said the girl.

"We should have gone there. I don't know how I can ask her to forgive
me."

"But it was not you!" cried Molly.

"Yes. Because I did not object. I did not tell you we must go to her.
I missed the point, thinking so much about my own feelings. For you
see--and I've never said this to you until now--your mother did hurt me.
When you said you would have me after my years of waiting, and I wrote
her that letter telling her all about myself, and how my family was not
like yours, and--and--all the rest I told her, why you see it hurt me
never to get a word back from her except just messages through you. For
I had talked to her about my hopes and my failings. I had said more
than ever I've said to you, because she was your mother. I wanted her to
forgive me, if she could, and feel that maybe I could take good care of
you after all. For it was bad enough to have her daughter quit her home
to teach school out hyeh on Bear Creek. Bad enough without havin' me to
come along and make it worse. I have missed the point in thinking of my
own feelings."

"But it's not your doing!" repeated Molly.

With his deep delicacy he had put the whole matter as a hardship to her
mother alone. He had saved her any pain of confession or denial. "Yes,
it is my doing," he now said. "Shall we give it up?"

"Give what--?" She did not understand.

"Why, the order we've got it fixed in. Plans are--well, they're no
more than plans. I hate the notion of changing, but I hate hurting your
mother more. Or, anyway, I OUGHT to hate it more. So we can shift, if
yu' say so. It's not too late."

"Shift?" she faltered.

"I mean, we can go to your home now. We can start by the stage to-night.
Your mother can see us married. We can come back and finish in the
mountains instead of beginning in them. It'll be just merely shifting,
yu' see."

He could scarcely bring himself to say this at all; yet he said it
almost as if he were urging it. It implied a renunciation that he could
hardly bear to think of. To put off his wedding day, the bliss upon
whose threshold he stood after his three years of f