Over the New England hills the hazy¹ light of a most glorious Indian Summer was shining, while the forest trees, in their gorgeous array of crimson² and gold, lifted their tall heads as proudly as if they heard not in the distance the voice of coming sorrows, and the sighing of winter winds. The birds had flown to their southern home where I fondly hoped to meet them, for I was to be a bride—Richard’s bride—and the day for my bridal had come. We had been everywhere—Richard and I—all over the old Meadow Brook³ farm, sacred to me for the many hallowed associations which clustered around it, and very, very dear to him because it was my childhood’s home. So he told me when we stood for the last time beneath the spreading grape-vine, and I pointed⁴ out to him the place where years before I had lain in the long green grass and wept over the fickleness⁵ of one who was naught⁶ to me now, save a near friend.

 

Together we had sat in the old brown schoolhouse,—he in the big arm chair, and I—but no matter where I sat when I told him of the little romping⁷ girl with yellow hair, who had there first learned to con⁸ the alphabet and to trace on the gaily⁹ colored maps the boundary lines of Georgia, little dreaming that her home would one day be there. Then 355when I showed him the bench where I had lain when the faintness came over me, he wound his arm closer around me,—though wherefore I do not know. Together too, we had gone over the old farmhouse¹⁰, he lingering longest in the room where I was born, and when he thought I didn’t see him,

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