"Have you got any other beau in your head, Jemima?" she said. "Because if you have, you’d better put him out pretty suddenly. If your father should find it out, he would—I don’t know what he would do. He would certainly punish you well, big girl as you are. Is that what’s the matter? Answer me! Have you got another beau?" Dawn looked up with great angry, flashing eyes, horror changing into contempt. "I have never even thought of such a dreadful thing!" she said, with a withering look, and swept haughtily from the room. But on the way upstairs the color crept slowly into her cheeks, and her eyes drooped half-ashamed. Was there? Yes, there was some one else enshrined within her heart, some one whose face had smiled in sympathy just once, and toward whom she felt as she had never felt to any human being save her mother. Of course he was nothing to her but the vision of a moment, and never, never, could he be called by the hateful word her stepmother had used, that detestable word "beau." It seemed to the poor, tried child as if she could almost kill any one who used that word. After that, Dawn endured her misery in secret, speaking not at all, unless spoken to. The older woman looked at her curiously, almost nervously, sometimes, as if the girl were half uncanny. She was glad in her heart that the day of the wedding was close at hand, for if she knew anything about signs, that girl was on the verge of throwing over a fine marriage, and then they would have her on their hands for years, perhaps. Mrs. Van Rensselaer had suffered not a little for her share in the tragedy of these lives with which she had bound up her own, and was not willing to endure more. She shut her thin lips and determined to watch the girl carefully and prevent if possible any slip between cup and lip. Meantime, with ever-growing dread, Dawn counted the hours, and watched sleepless through the long nights, now calling on her dead mother for help, now praying to be saved in some way from the nameless fear which, try as she would, she could not shake off. The family relatives on both sides were gathering and starting, some on long journeys, to attend the wedding. CHAPTER VI Charles Winthrop had written his family that matters which he wished to complete would detain him at the college for a few weeks, and begged his father to make his excuses at the wedding. He had an instinctive feeling that Harrington would not care, as well as an inexplicable aversion to being a witness at the wedding ceremony of his elder brother and the girl who had burst upon his vision that afternoon and seemed to open a new world to him.