rs Fuller doesn't give us half a chance,' said Livingstone, 'she
guards her day and night. It's like the monks and the Holy Grail.

'Hope is independent of the young men,' said Mrs Fuller as we rose from
the table. 'If I cannot go with her myself, in the carriage, I always
send a maid or a manservant to walk home with her. But Mr Fuller and
I were out of town that night and the young men missed their great
opportunity.

'Had a differ'nt way o' sparkin' years ago,' said Uncle Eb. 'Didn't
never hev if please anybody but the girl then. If ye liked a girl ye
went an' sot up with her an' gin her a smack an' tol' her right out
plain an' square what ye wanted. An' thet settled it one way er t'
other. An' her mother she step' in the next room with the door half-open
an' never paid no 'tention. Recollec' one col'night when I was sparkin'
the mother hollered out o' bed, "Lucy, hev ye got anythin 'round ye?"
an' she hollered back, "Yis, mother," an' she hed too but 'twan't
nothin' but my arm.'

They laughed merrily, over the quaint reminiscence of my old friend
and the quainter way he had of telling it. The rude dialect of the
backwoodsman might have seemed oddly out of place, there, but for the
quiet, unassuming manner and the fine old face of Uncle Eb in which the
dullest eye might see the soul of a gentleman.

'What became of Lucy?' Mr Fuller enquired, laughingly. 'You never
married her.'

'Lucy died,' he answered soberly; 'thet was long, long ago.'

Then he went away with John Trumbull to the smoking-room where I found
them, talking earnestly in a corner, when it was time to go to the
church with Hope.

Chapter 30

Hope and Uncle Eb and I went away in a coach with Mrs Fuller. There
was a great crowd in the church that covered, with sweeping arches, an
interior more vast than any I had ever entered. Hope was gowned in
white silk, a crescent of diamonds in her hair--a birthday gift from
Mrs Fuller; her neck and a part of her full breast unadorned by anything
save the gifts of God--their snowy whiteness, their lovely curves.

First Henry Cooper came on with his violin--a great master as I now
remember him. Then Hope ascended to the platform, her dainty kid
slippers showing under her gown, and the odious Livingstone escorting
her. I was never so madly in love or so insanely jealous. I must confess
it for I am trying to tell the whole truth of myself--I was a fool. And
it is the greater folly that one says ever 'I wa