arried, bound--despite
all incompatibilities--to be shaped--if not at once by choice, then at
last by merciless necessity--to all that Age's lines and standards, to
walk wherever it should lead, partner in all its vicissitudes, pains and
fates.

The train moved. Mr. Fair sat with Barbara. Major Grant secured a seat
beside Sister Proudfit--"aha--ha-ha!"--"t-he-he-he-he!" Fannie gave
Shotwell the place beside her, and so on. Even Johanna, by taking a
child in her lap, got a seat. But Ravenel and Colonel Proudfit had to
stand up beside Fannie and Barbara. Thus it fell out that when everyone
laughed at a moonshiner's upsetting on a pile of loose telegraph poles,
Ravenel, looking out from over the swarm of heads, saw something which
moved him to pull the bell-cord.

"Two people wanting to get on," said Shotwell, as Ravenel went to the
coach's rear platform. "They in a buggy. Now they out. Here they--Law',
Miss Fannie, who you reckon it is? Guess! You _cayn't_, miss!"

Barbara, with studied indifference, asked Fair the time of day.

"There," said Shotwell, "they've gone into the cah behind us."

"Sister March and her son," observed Garnet to Mrs. Proudfit and the
train moved on.

XXV.

BY RAIL

Everybody felt playful and nearly everybody coquettish. When Sister
Proudfit, in response to some sly gallantry of Garnet's used upon him a
pair of black eyes, he gave her the whole wealth of his own. He must
have overdone the matter, for the next moment he found Fannie's eyes
levelled directly on him. She withdrew them with a casual remark to
Barbara, yet not till they had said to him, in solemn silence:

"You villain, that time I saw you!"

Mrs. March had pushed cheerily into the rear Suez coach. Away from home
and its satieties no one could be more easily or thoroughly pleased. Her
son said the forward coach was better, but in there she had sighted
Fannie and Barbara, and so----

"There's more room in here," she insisted with sweet buoyancy.

Hamlet Graves rose. "Here, Cousin Daphne!" His brother Lazarus stood up
with him.

"Here, John, your maw'll feel better if you're a-sett'n' by her."

But she urged the seat, with coy temerity, upon Mr. Ravenel.

"How well she looks in mourning," remarked two Blackland County ladies.
"Yes, she's pretty yet; what a lovely smile."

"Don't go 'way," she exclaimed, with hostile alarm, as John turned
toward the coach's front. He said he would not, and chose a
standing-pla