and bid her good-night. Had Burr Gordon, in those
days, been less aware of his own unfaithfulness and
weariness, and less fiercely resolved not to yield
to it, he might well have perceived Dorothy’s.
As it was he confused her coldness with his own, and
attributed it to the change in his own heart, and
not to that in hers. And even had he suspected
it he would not have made the first motion for freedom,
so desperate was his adherence to falsity for the
sake of truth.
Burr Gordon had at stake in this last more than any
temporal good or ill of love. He had at stake
his whole belief in himself, and he was also actuated
by another motive which he scarcely admitted in his
own thoughts.
Convinced he was that Madelon Hautville, believing
as she did that he had forsaken her for honest love
of another, would hold him in utter scorn and contempt
were she to discover him false to Dorothy as she had
been to her; and his very love of her love, strangely
enough, kept him true to her rival.
So he went to see Dorothy, and found no fault with
her coldness. The wedding preparations went on,
and at last the day came.
The wedding was to be at eight o’clock in the
evening, and nearly all the village was bidden to
it—even many of the Unitarian faction who
had been Parson Fair’s old parishioners.
At half-past seven o’clock the street was full
of people. The village women rustled through the
soft dusk with silken whispers of wide best skirts.
Young girls with spring buds in their hair flounced
about with white muslins, and fluttering with ribbons,
flitted along. The men, holding back firmly their
best broadcloth shoulders, marched past in their creaking
Sunday shoes. Before eight o’clock the fine
old rooms in Parson Fair’s house were lined
with faces solemnly expectant, as the faces of simple
country folk are wont to be before the great rites
of love and death.
The women sat with their mitted hands folded on their
silken laps, their best brooches pinning decorously
their fine-wrought neckerchiefs, their bosoms filled
with sober knowledge and patient acquiescence.
The young girls sat among them very still, with the
stillness of unrest, like birds who alight only to
fly, their soft cheeks burning, their necks and arms
showing rosy through their laces, their little clasped
fingers full of pulses, and their hearts tumultuous
and stirred to imagination by the sweet surmise and
ignorance of love. They looked seldom at the young
men, and the young men at them, as they sat waiting.
Still there were some who had learned in city schools
the suavities which cover like clothes the primal
emotions of life, and they moved about with exchanges
of fine courtesies, while the others looked at them
wondering.
