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The Mettle of the Pasture

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his work, his plans, his ambitions; made him feel always not only that she did not wish to see him suffer, but that she expected to see him succeed. They were seen walking together and driving together. He demurred, but she insisted. "I will not accept such a sacrifice," he said, but she overruled him by her reply: "It is not a sacrifice; it is a vindication of myself, that you cannot oppose." But he knew that there was more in it than what she called vindication of herself; there was the fighting friendship of a comrade. During these days, Isabel met cold faces. She found herself a fresh target for criticism, a further source of misunderstanding. And there was fresh suffering, too, which no one could have foreseen. Late one twilight when she and Rowan were driving, they passed Marguerite driving also, she being still a guest at the Merediths', and getting well. Each carriage was driving slowly, and the road was not wide, and the wheels almost locked, and there was time enough for everything to be seen. And the next day, Marguerite went home from the Merediths' and passed into a second long illness. The day came for Isabel to leave--she was going away to remain a long time, a year, two years. They had had their last drive and twilight was falling when they returned to the Hardages'. She was standing on the steps as she gave him both her hands. "Good-by," she said, in the voice of one who had finished her work. "I hardly know what to say--I have said everything. Perhaps I ought to tell you my last feeling is, that you will make life a success, that nothing will pull you down. I suppose that the life of each of us, if it is worth while, is not made up of one great effort and of one failure or of one success, but of many efforts, many failures, partial successes. But I am afraid we all try at first to realize our dreams. Good-by!" "Marry me," he said, tightening his grasp on her hands and speaking as though he had the right. She stepped quickly back from him. She felt a shock, a delicate wound, and she said with a proud tear: "I did not think you would so misjudge me in all that I have been trying to do." 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. After his departure their fright and apprehensions settled on Mrs. Meredith. They ranged themselves on chairs side by side against a wall, and sat confronting her like a class in the public school fated to be examined in deadly branches. None moved except when she spoke, and then all writhed together but each in a different way; the most comforting word from her produced a family spasm with individual proclivities. Rowan tried to talk with the father about crops: they were frankly embarrassed. What can a young man with two thousand acres of the best land say to an old man with fifty of the poorest? The mother and son drove home in silence. She drew one of his hands into her lap and held it with close pressure. They did not look at each other. As the carriage rolled easily over the curved driveway, through the noble forest trees they caught glimpses of the house now standing

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