At the wedding Rhoda was bridesmaid and Delavan was groomsman. As she saw her mother’s eyes fixed wistfully upon them she felt fresh twinges of self-reproach. She knew the deep pleasure that Charlotte’s marriage to a southerner had brought to the ailing woman, and she knew that this would be as nothing beside her satisfaction and delight could she see her other daughter united in marriage to the son of her old friend. Could it be, after all, Rhoda began to ask herself, that here was where her highest duty lay? Ought she, at whatever cost to herself, make happy her mother’s last days? It seemed to Rhoda that everything conspired, throughout the wedding festivities, to bring her and Delavan alone together, although she knew that they were both trying to avoid such meetings. But he forebore to speak of love, and afterward the merry friendliness of these brief occasions, just touched as they were with the fragrance of intimacy, were among her dearest memories. When he bade her good-by she felt the lover in his manner and his voice as he said: “It has been two years, Rhoda, but I shall wait two years more, and ten times that, before I give up hope of our wedding!” Rhoda looked at him with her flashing smile, that lifting of her short upper lip and trembling at its corners and lighting of her eyes, which always sent through his veins a fresh thrill of love, and answered: “Oh, Jeff! What a long time to prepare for a wedding in!” After it was all over Mrs. Ware failed rapidly. Rhoda watched her wasting cheeks and growing feebleness with an agony of compassion and constant tumultuous questioning of herself. Her mother had not spoken to her for a long time about Delavan’s suit, but she knew that the wish was gathering strength in her breast as she came nearer and nearer to death’s door. Rhoda felt it in the wistful look with which the brown eyes, grown so large and childlike in the peaked face, followed her about the room. It spoke to her in the plaintive appeal of the soft southern voice and it pulled mightily at her heartstrings in the clinging to hers of the thin hands, a little while ago so plump and fair. With her own heart playing traitor, as it always did with every weakening of her resolution, with love and compassion for the invalid pleading incessantly, with a remorse-wrung conscience recalling every hurt she had ever given to her mother and urging that she ought to salve those many wounds with this final atonement, the torment of it became almost greater than she could bear. One day she found her father alone in his office and, impelled by her distraught heart, she forgot her usual restraints, flung herself on her knees beside his chair and laid her face against his knee.