Beside the road, close to the gate which led to the wide field at the foot of Penfield’s hill, under the shadow of a clump of hemlocks, Isaac Penfield had been waiting since quarter past eight o’clock. When the white company came in sight he drew farther back within the shadow, scanning the people eagerly as they passed. Solomon Lennox and Deacon Scranton let down the bars, and the people passed through silently, crowding each other whitely like a flock of sheep. Sophia Anne, the deaf-and-dumb boy holding fast to her hand, was among the first. Isaac had expected to see Melissa close to her mother; but she had become separated from her and came among the last. Her slender figure was hidden in her flowing white robes, but there was no mistaking her gentle faltering gait and the delicate bend of her fair uncovered head. Isaac stepped forward suddenly, threw his arm around Melissa, and drew her back with him within the shadow of the hemlocks. Nobody saw it but Abby Mosely, Simeon Lennox’s housekeeper, and she was too panic-stricken to heed it intelligently; she went panting on after the others in her voluminous white robe, and left Melissa alone with Isaac Penfield. Isaac pressed Melissa’s head close to his breast, leaned his face down to hers, and whispered long in her ear. She listened trembling and unresisting; then she broke away from him weakly, “I can’t, I can’t,” she moaned. But he caught her again, and whispered again with his lips close to her soft pale cheek, and frequent kisses between the words. “Come, now, sweetheart,” he said at length, and attempted to draw her with him into the road; but she pulled herself away from him again, and stood warding him off with her white-draped arms. “I can’t, I can’t,” she moaned again. “I must go with father and mother.” “I tell you they are wrong; can’t you believe me?” “I--must--go with them.” “No; come with me, Melissa.” Melissa, still with her arms raised against him, looked away over the meadow, full of moving white figures. The moon shone out over it, and it gleamed like a field of Paradise peopled with angels. Then she looked up in her lover’s face, and suddenly it was to her as if she saw therein the new earth of all her dreams. Solomon Lennox and his followers kept on to Penfield’s hill, which arose before them crowned with silver, and Isaac Penfield hastened down the road to the village, half carrying Melissa’s little white-clad figure, wrapped against the cold in his own gray cloak.