"Why should I worry about it?" he said to Grace. "When the North gets angry enough to put its foot down, all this bluster about State-rights, and these efforts to foist slavery on a people who are disgusted with it, will cease." "Take care," she replied, archly. "I'm a Southern girl. Think what might happen if I put my foot down." "Oh, when it comes to you," was his quick response, "I'm the Democratic party. I will get down on my knees at any time; I'll yield anything and stand everything." "I hope you will be in just such a frame of mind ten years hence." It was well that the future was hidden from her. Hilland wrote to his friend, asking, indeed almost insisting, that he should return in time for the wedding. Graham did not come, and intimated that he was gathering materials which might result in a book. He sent a letter, however, addressed to them both, and full of a spirit of such loyal good-will that Hilland said it was like a brother's grip. "Well, well," he concluded, "if Graham has the book-making fever upon him, we shall have to give him up indefinitely." Grace was at first inclined to take the same view, feeling that, even if he had been sorely wounded, his present life and the prospects it gave of authorship had gained so great a fascination that he would come back eventually with only a memory of what he had suffered. Her misgivings, however, returned when, on seeing the letter, Mrs. Mayburn's eyes became suddenly dimmed with tears. She turned away abruptly and seemed vexed with herself for having shown the emotion, but only said quietly, "I once thought Alford had no heart; but that letter was not written 'out of his head,' as we used to say when children." She gave Grace no reason to complain of any lack of affectionate interest in her preparations; and when the wedding day came she assured the blushing girl that "no one had ever looked upon a lovelier bride." Ever mindful of her father, Grace would take no wedding journey, although her old friend offered to come and care for him. She knew well how essential her voice and hand were to his comfort; and she would not permit him to entertain, even for a moment, the thought that in any sense he had lost her. So they merely returned to his favorite haunt by the sea, and Hilland was loyal to the only condition in their engagement--that she should be permitted to keep her promise to her dying mother, and never leave her father to the care of others, unless under circumstances entirely beyond her control. Later in the season Mrs. Mayburn joined them at the beach, for she found her life at the cottage too lonely to be endured.