rfectly
healthy and strong woman, and that to persist in any farther recognition
of the old bond, after she had so intelligently and emphatically
repudiated all thought of such a relation to her cousin, was absurd. Dr.
Fearing alone was in doubt, He said little; but he shook his head and
clasped his hands tight, and implored that at least the marriage should be
deferred for a year.

Annie herself, however, refused to consent to this: of course no
satisfactory reason could be alleged for any such delay; and she said as
frankly as a little child, "Edward and I have loved each other almost
from the very first; there is nothing for either of us to do in life but
to make each other happy; and we shall not leave papa and mamma: so why
should we wait?"

They were not married, however, until spring. The whole town stood by in
speechless joy and delight when those two beautiful young beings came out
from the village church man and wife. It was a scene never to be
forgotten. The peculiar atmosphere of almost playful joyousness which they
created whenever they appeared together was something which could not be
described, but which diffused itself like sunlight.

We all tried resolutely to dismiss memory and misgiving from our hearts.
They seemed disloyalty and sin. George Ware was in India. George Ware's
mother was dead. The cottage among the pines was sold to strangers, and
the glistening brown paths under the trees were neglected and unused.

Edward and Annie led the same gay child-like lives after their marriage
that they had led before: they looked even younger and gayer and sunnier.
When they dashed cantering through the river meadows, she with rosy cheeks
and pale brown curls flying in the wind, and he with close crisp black
hair, and the rich, dark, glowing skin of a Spaniard, the farming men
turned and rested on their tools, and gazed till they were out of sight.
Sometimes I asked myself wonderingly, "Are they ever still, and tender,
and silent?" "Is this perpetual overflow the whole of love?" But it seemed
treason to doubt in the presence of such merry gladness as shone in
Annie's face, and in her husband's too. It was simply the incarnate
triumph and joy of young life.

The summer went by; the chrysanthemums bloomed out white and full in my
garden; the frosts came, and then the winter, and then Annie told me one
day that before winter came again she would be a mother. She was a little
sobered as she saw the intense