She went quickly in.

VII

It was a morning in the middle of October when Dent and Pansy were married.

The night before had been cool and clear after a rain and a long-speared frost had fallen.  Even before the sun lifted itself above the white land, a full red rose of the sky behind the rotting barn, those early abroad foresaw what the day would be.  Nature had taken personal interest in this union of her two children, who worshipped her in their work and guarded her laws in their characters, and had arranged that she herself should be present in bridal livery.

The two prim little evergreens which grew one on each side of the door-step waited at respectful attention like heavily powdered festal lackeys.  The scraggy aged cedars of the yard stood about in green velvet and brocade incrusted with gems.  The doorsteps themselves were softly piled with the white flowers of the frost, and the bricks of the pavement strewn with multitudinous shells and stars of dew and air.  Every poor stub of grass, so economically cropped by the geese, wore something to make it shine.  In the back yard a clothes-line stretched between a damson and a peach tree, and on it hung forgotten some of Pansy’s father’s underclothes; but Nature did what she could to make the toiler’s raiment look like diamonded banners, flung bravely to the breeze in honor of his new son-in-law.  Everything—­the duck troughs, the roof of the stable, the cart shafts, the dry-goods box used as a kennel—­had ugliness hidden away under that prodigal revelling ermine of decoration.  The sun itself had not long risen before Nature even drew over that a bridal veil of silver mist, so that the whole earth was left wrapped in whiteness that became holiness.

Pansy had said that she desired a quiet wedding, so that she herself had shut up the ducks that they might not get to Mrs. Meredith.  And then she had made the rounds and fed everything; and now a certain lethargy and stupor of food quieted all creatures and gave to the valley the dignity of a vocal solitude.

The botanist bride was not in the least abashed during the ceremony.  Nor proud:  Mrs. Meredith more gratefully noticed this.  And she watched closely and discovered with relief that Pansy did not once glance at her with uneasiness or for approval.  The mother looked at Dent with eyes growing dim.  “She will never seem to be the wife of my son,” she said, “but she will make her children look like his children.”

And so it was all over and they were gone—­slipped away through the hiding white mists without a doubt of themselves, without a doubt of each other, mating as naturally as the wild creatures who never know the problems of human selection, or the problems that civilization leaves to be settled after selection has been made.

Mrs. Meredith and Rowan and the clergyman were left with the father and the children, and with an unexampled wedding collation—­one of Pansy’s underived masterpieces.  The clergyman frightened the younger children; they had never seen his like either with respect to his professional robes or his superhuman clerical voice—­their imaginations balancing unsteadily between the impossibility of his being a man in a nightgown and the impossibility of his being a woman with a mustache.