She could laugh with him now, and when she laughed he found a new excuse for a new adoration. He was not gifted in frivolity, and the old house seemed to store up her mirth for dark days when remembered laughter would make a more heartbreaking echo than the remembered drip of tears. Breakfast left his soul famished for her love, but she would not be serious. She flitted and chirped like a bird that lures a hunter away from her nest. She seemed to evade him, “to lock herself from his resort,” to be preparing retreats and defences. He was humiliated and shamefully ashamed to find that she was not yet his wife save by ceremony and appearance. He had sharply rebuked the old farmer for a crassly familiar joke or two upon a consummation devotedly to be wished, but he would have hung his head if the truth were known. Then finally, suddenly, strangely, she was his, and in a manner of no sanctity at all, in a mood of eddying passion, like an evil intrigue. Many of the bachelors, and many of the married men, kept mistresses, but Patty was his wife. And yet he felt a bewildering sense of infidelity to somebody, something. Was it because she seemed afterwards to wear a look of guilt? Was she thinking that she was disloyal to that man Chalender, whose ghost perhaps by now had left his body and followed her up into this citadel? If she seemed to feel guilty, she betrayed also an exhilaration in the crime, a bravado he had never imagined her capable of. He was the one that suffered remorse, and he came to wonder if it were not after all man and not woman who had invented modesty and chastity, and who upheld them as ideals which women accepted rather in obedience than in conviction. Evidently woman must be controlled and coerced for her own salvation. There had been recently a flurry of a few insane zealots who had coined a new phrase, “Women’s Rights,” and had invented an obscene garment named after a shameless Mrs. Bloomer. In Boston a few benighted wearers of this atrocity had been properly mobbed off the streets. They were even less popular and less likely to succeed than the anti-slavery fanatics. RoBards was glad that Patty was at the other extreme from such bigots. He would rather have her a butterfly than a beetle. He loved her for saying once: “I want to be ruled, Mist’ RoBards, if you please!” And by God he would rule her—and for God he would rule her, and save her, soul and body. If either failed it would be his fault. Pride in her meekness, fear for her frailty, pity for her lack of intellect, and wonder at her graces, were intertwisted with moods of a groveling unworthiness of her, of upstaring rapture before her mystic wisdoms. Her purity seemed to be replenished after the storms of love, as the blue sky came back innocent and untarnished after a black cloud and lightning. Quick tempests rose and passed, and a fleet angelic quality brought her down to earth on and in a rainbow from heaven.