They came to the river, she and Pen, where it bends through the gorge, and sat down there under a ledge of sandstone, one groping finger of the sunshine coming in to hold her freckled cheek and soft reddish hair. They say the sun does shine the same on just and unjust; but he likes best to linger, I know, on things wholesome and pure like this girl. When Pen began to play "jacks" with the smooth stones on the shore, she spread out her skirt for him to sit on,--to keep him close, hugging him now and then, with the tears coming to her eyes: because she had seen Paul an hour before, and promised all he asked. And Pen was the only thing there of home, you know. And on this her wedding-day she loved them all with a hungry pain, somehow, as never before. She was going back to-morrow; she could work and help them just as before; and yet a gulf seemed opening between them forever. She had been selfish and petulant,--she saw that now; sometimes impatient with her old father's trumpery rocks, or Lizzy's discontent; in a rage, often, at Joseph. Now she saw how hardly life had dealt with them, how poor and bare their lives were. _She_ might have made them warmer and softer, if she had chosen. Please God, she would try, when she went home again,--wiping the hot tears off, and kissing Pen's dismal face, until he rebelled. The shadows were lengthening, the rock above her threw a jagged, black boundary about her feet. When the sun was behind yon farthest hill she was going back, up to the little church, with Pen; then she would give herself to her master, forever. Whatever feeling this brought into her soul, she kept it there silent, not coming to her face as the other had done in blushes or tears. She waited, her hands clutched together, watching the slow sinking of the sun. Not even to Paul had she said what this hour was to her. She had come a long journey; this was the end. "I would like to be alone until the time comes," she had said, and had left him. He did not know what he was to the girl; she loved him, moderately, he thought, with a temperate appreciation that taunted his hot passion. She did not choose that even he should know with what desperate abandonment of self she had absorbed his life into hers. She chose to be alone, shrinking, with a sort of hatred, from the vulgar or strange eyes that would follow her into the church. In this beginning of her new life she wanted to be alone with God and this soul, only kinsman of her own. If they could but go, Paul and she, up into one of these mountain-peaks, with Him that made them very near, and there give themselves to each other, before God, forever!