Sixty or seventy years before that July day Sandy McPherson had been a rich young farmer in the neighborhood and looked up to and respected by every one. He was not very handsome, with his light hair and eyes and freckled face, but his money and great kindness of heart made amends for what he lacked in his personal appearance, and there was scarcely a girl in the town who would not gladly have taken him with his freckled face, light hair and Scotch brogue. When his choice fell upon Nannie Wilkes much wonder was expressed at her indifference to his suit and her preference for Jack Bryan, a handsome, rollicking young man, who played fast and loose with all the girls, and with none more so than with pretty Nannie Wilkes, until he heard that in a fit of pique she had accepted Sandy and was to be married in a month. Then his real love for her showed itself, and many were the arguments used to dissuade her from her promise. But Nannie was firm. She had pledged her word to Sandy and would keep it. She did not care so very much for him, she said; he had too many freckles and talked with a brogue, but her mother was anxious for the match and he was rich, and could give her a piano and solid silver tea-set, and carryall with a top to it and two horses, to say nothing of his handsome house. Jack could give her nothing but a very humble home with his half-blind mother and a salary as grocer’s clerk at eighteen dollars a week. And so the wedding day drew on apace, and Nannie’s gowns were being made by a seamstress who went to Boston twice a year and was consequently posted on fashions. Nearly every night Sandy went to Nannie’s home, where the girl’s eyes, full of unshed tears, seldom met his glance, and her little hands lay in his great warm ones, cold and passive, with no return of the loving pressure he gave them. On the nights when he was not with her Nannie sat in the pine-woods, with Jack’s arm around her and Jack’s face very near her own, while he pleaded with her to give up the marriage with Sandy and take him instead. He could not give her a piano nor silver tea-set, nor carryall with a top to it, but he could buy her a buggy. One had been offered him at a bargain. And he’d get her a melodeon, and his mother had lots of old china, and he would work like a beaver in the garden and yard to make them more like the McPherson grounds. But neither the second-hand buggy, nor the melodeon, nor the old china appealed to Nannie, who only shook her head. “I’ll tell you what,” he said to her at last, when all his arguments had failed to elicit from her anything more than, “I’ve given my word and I can’t break it. You should have spoken this way sooner.”