But alas for Ethelyn’s visions of heavy silk and costly lace!  How they vanished before this woman in purple calico, with ruffles of the same standing up about the throat, and the cotton lace coiffure upon her head!  She was very glad to see her boy and wound both her arms around his neck, but she was afraid of Ethelyn.  She, too, had had her ideal, but it was not like this proud-looking beauty, dressed so stylishly, and, as it seemed to her so extravagantly, with her long, full skirt of handsome poplin trailing so far behind her, and her basque fitting her graceful figure so admirably.  Neither did the hat, rolled so jauntily on the sides, and giving her a coquettish appearance, escape her notice, nor the fact that the dotted veil was not removed from the white face, even after Richard had put the little, plump hand in hers, and said: 

“This, mother, is Ethie, my wife.  I hope you will love each other for my sake.”

In her joy at seeing her pet boy again, Mrs. Markham would have done a great deal for his sake, but she could not “kiss a veil,” as she afterwards said to Melinda Jones, when she reached the point where she talked straight out about her daughter-in-law.  No, she could not kiss a veil, and so she only held and pressed Ethelyn’s hand, and leading her into the house, told her she was very welcome, and bade her come to the fire and take off her things, and asked if she was not tired, and cold and hungry.

And Ethelyn tried to answer, but the great lumps were swelling in her throat, and so keen a pain was tugging at her heart that when at last, astonished at her silence, Richard said, “What is the matter, Ethie—­why don’t you answer mother?” she burst out in a pitiful cry: 

“Oh, Richard, I can’t, I can’t; please take me back to Aunt Barbara.”

This was the crisis, the concentration of all she had been suffering for the last hour, and it touched Mrs. Markham’s heart, for she remembered just how wretched she had been when she first landed at the rude log cabin which was so long her Western home, and turning to Richard, she said, in an aside: 

“She is homesick, poor child, as it’s natural she should be at first.  She’ll be better by and by, so don’t think strange of it.  She seems very young.”

In referring to her youth, Mrs. Markham meant nothing derogatory to her daughter-in-law, though Ethelyn did strike her as very young, in her pretty hat with her heavy hair low in her neck.  She was finding an excuse for her crying, and did not mean that Ethelyn should hear.  But she did hear, and the hot tears were dashed aside at once.  She was too proud to be petted or patronized by Mrs. Markham, or apologized for by her, so she dried her eyes, and lifting her head, said proudly: 

“I am tired to-night, and my head is aching so hard that I lost my self-control.  I beg you will excuse me.  Richard knows me too well to need an excuse.”