After this day, there came another, and another and another: and still it seemed that death overshadowed life, and joy was overwhelmed in grief. The shadow of this first final parting seemed to close down on the young girl's happiness like a cover, and for a space her engagement was less real to her than the shut office downstairs, the empty seat at the table. But youth, after all, is made for life, and thereby equipped with a merciful resilience. The passage of time, mere use, worked wonders. And Angela's blessing it was, no doubt, that from the beginning she had others than herself to think about, and the need for much activity. First and foremost, there was Donald, who was with her morning, noon, and night, whose first sight of her in a black dress had moved him almost to tears. It was not fair to the man who had won her that she should give way to a limitless melancholy. Beyond that, loomed the sudden colossal fact of the wedding, which would have to take place almost immediately; for her duty now was to her future husband, and the demands of his work must overcome her girlish shrinkings from such unwonted haste. And a wedding must mean clothes, at all times, and clothes, even at the plainest and simplest, must mean some thought and some diversion. Insensibly, death turned back to life again. The great confused day of Angela's life was a week old; it was two weeks old; it was three. And winter now was fading from the softening air... They were the quietest weeks imaginable. Except her mother and her _fiancé_, Angela saw no one for days together, not even Mary Wing. For Mary, as it happened, was sick at this time--her first illness in five years, so Mrs. Wing said. She had caught cold, it seemed, in the wet at the funeral, and the cold had developed into quite a serious attack of bronchitis, which kept her in bed two weeks or more. Thus the young couple, in their mourning, were left completely to themselves. In their isolation, in the still little parlor, they were planning at great length about their future, going over and over their new common problems from every possible angle. And the more Angela's fatherlessness was accepted as a permanent fact in the order of the future, the clearer it became that this fact must color and affect everything else. In chief, this question of the girl's came more and more to the front of the loverly discussions: How could she go off to wild remote Wyoming, now that her mother was a widow? XXII It was March now, the mild March of an early spring. There came new days, zephyrous and sweet. All the world seemed to love a lover. But other matters were afoot in the world, too, necessarily: afoot even in the old coterie itself.