The March winds were blowing when they made his mother’s grave, and Adam’s heart was not as sore now as on that dismal, rainy night, when he first sat alone in his little cottage and missed the groping hand feeling for his own. Anna was coming within a week, Anna who had said, “I am not half good enough for you.” How the remembrance of these words even now brought a smile to the lips where the sweat drops were standing as he toiled for her, putting the last finishing strokes to the home prepared for his future bride, Anna Burroughs, the Deacon’s only daughter, the fairest maiden in all the goodly town of Rhodes—Anna, who had been away to school for a whole year, who could speak another language than her own, whose hands were soft and white as wool, whom all the village lads coveted, and at whom it was rumored even Herbert Dunallen the heir of Castlewild, where Adam worked so much, had cast admiring glances. Not good enough for him? She was far too good for a great burly fellow like himself, a poor mechanic, who had never looked into the Algebras and Euclids piled on Anna’s table the morning after she came from school. This was what Adam thought, wondering why she had chosen him, and if she were not sorry. Sometimes of late he had fancied a coldness in her manner, a shrinking from his caresses; but the very idea had made his great, kind heart, throb with a pang so keen that he had striven to banish it, for to lose his darling now would be worse than death. He had thought it all over that August day, when he nailed down the bright new carpet in what was to be her room. “Our room,” he said softly to himself, as he watched his coadjutor, old Aunt Martha Eastman, smoothing and arranging the snowy pillows upon the nicely made up bed, and looping with bows of pure white satin the muslin curtains which shaded the pretty bay window. That window was his own handiwork. He had planned and built it himself, for Anna was partial to bay windows. He had heard her say so once when she came up to Castlewild where he was making some repairs, and so he had made her two, one in the bed-room, and one in the pleasant parlor looking out upon the little garden full of flowers. Adam’s taste was perfect, and many a passer by stopped to admire the bird’s nest cottage, peeping out from its thick covering of ivy leaves and flowering vines. Adam was pleased with it himself, and when the last tack had been driven and the last chair set in its place, he went over it alone admiring as he went, and wondering how it would strike Anna. Would her soft blue eyes light up with joy, or would they wear the troubled look he had sometimes observed in them? “If they do,” and Adam’s breath came hard as he said it, and his hands were locked tightly together, “If they do, I’ll lead her into mother’s room; she won’t deceive me there. I’ll tell her that I would not take a wife who does not love me; that though to give her up is like tearing out my