“My people did not want me to marry him,” Mrs. Ware went on, “because he was a northerner. But one day he came to take me to ride--two such splendid black horses they were, and how they could travel! Well, we went, for I always had my own way, and such a wild ride we had! We galloped and galloped, and I was very gay, as I always was, but your father, Rhoda, looked so serious and strange that I was a little frightened inside of me, though I wouldn’t have let him know it for the world. I suppose that made me--a little--worse than usual, and he didn’t say anything, but just made the horses go faster and faster, and after a while he rode close beside me and seized my arm and said-- O, never mind what he said!”--her voice trembled and almost broke and it was a moment before she went on. “Well, the end of it was that we ran away and were married. Of course my people were very angry about it, but they forgave me, as I knew they would, though they never did quite forgive him. He took me away at once to New York, where he wanted to study medicine, and I never lived in the South again.” Rhoda listened with a little tremor in her nerves and her heart beating faster. Vividly the vision came before her--the pretty, gay young woman with her wilful coquetries and the masterful young man urging their horses faster and faster--and they were her father and mother! How strange it seemed to think of them under the stress of such a wild, compelling love. That, then, was what love was like--for its sake her mother had dared the anger of her people, and had given up them and their love and her home and all her early associations which had meant to her such great happiness. The moon was swimming upward through a sea-like expanse of dim blue sky and casting its spell of beauty over the flower-decked yard, the solemn tree shapes guarding the street and the glimpses of river beyond. Fireflies were weaving patterns of light down among the shrubbery and behind it the white palings of the fence gleamed, unreal as the walls of a dream palace. Up from the rose-laden bushes, on the softly stirring air, came waves of fragrance.