iendly greeting
from an occasional merchant, and then the breezy passage across the Rio
Grande bridge, spanning the meandering waters which never bore vessels of
any sort to the far-off sea, and finally the negotiation of the narrow
street in Piedras Negras, past the plaza and the bull-ring, and countless
little wine-shops, and the market, with its attractively displayed fruits
and vegetables from nobody knew where.

But it is not to be denied that his practice of making this journey to and
fro afoot was not without its prejudicial result. The people of quality of
either side of the river rarely ever set foot on the bridge, or on those
malodorous streets of Piedras Negras which lay near the river. Such people
employed a _cochero_ and drove, quite in the European style, when business
or pleasure drew them from their homes. There was an almost continuous
stream of _peones_ on the bridge in the mornings and evenings: silent,
furtive people, watched closely by the customs guard, whose duties
required him on occasion to examine a suspicious-appearing Mexican with
decidedly indelicate thoroughness. And all this did not tend to make the
bridge a popular promenade.

But Harboro was not squeamish, nor did he entertain slavish thoughts of
how people would feel over a disregarded custom. He liked simplicity, and
moreover he felt the need of exercise now that his work kept him inactive
most of the time. He was at an age when men take on flesh easily.

Nevertheless, people weren't favorably impressed when they looked down
from their old-fashioned equipages on their ride between the two
republics, and caught a glimpse of the chief clerk marching along the
bridge railing--often, as likely as not, in company with some chance
laborer or wanderer, whose garb clearly indicated his lowly estate.

And when, finally, Harboro persuaded Sylvia to accompany him on one of
these walks of his, the limits of his eccentricity were thought to have
been reached. Indeed, not a few people, who might have been induced to
forget that his marriage had been a scandalous one, were inclined for the
first time to condemn him utterly when he required the two towns to
contemplate him in company with the woman he had married, both of them
running counter to all the conventions.

The reason for this trip of Harboro's and Sylvia's was that Harboro wanted
Sylvia to have a new dress for a special occasion.

It happened that two or three weeks after his marriage