One of the mysteries of love to older ones is that two young people may become engaged and never a word be spoken. Put the girl in a convent, even, and let the boy but walk past, and the thing is done. They look and love, and the understanding is complete. They see and sigh, and read each other's secret thoughts, past and present--each other's hopes, fears. They sigh and are engaged, and there is perfect understanding. Time and Romance travel not together. Time must hurry on. Romance would loiter by the way. And so Romance, in her completeness, loves to dwell most where Time, traveling over the mile-tracks of the tropics, which belong by heredity to Alabama--stalks slower than on those strenuous half-mile tracks that spin around the earth in latitudes which grow smaller as they approach the frozen pole. The sun had reached, in his day's journey, the bald knob of Sunset Peak, and there, behind it, seemed to stop. At least to Helen Conway, born and reared under the brow of Sand Mountain, he seemed every afternoon, when he reached the mountain peak, to linger, in a friendly way, behind it. And a bold warrior-looking crest it was, helmeted with a stratum of sand-stone, jutting out in visor-shaped fullness about his head, and feathery above with scrub-oak and cedar. Perhaps it had been a fancy which lingered from childhood; but from the time when Mammy Maria had first told her that the sun went to bed in the valley beyond the mountain until now,--her eighteenth year,--Helen still loved to think it was true, and that behind the face of Sunset Rock he still lingered to undress; and, lingering, it made for her the sweetest and most romantic period of the day. True to her antebellum ideas, Mammy Maria dressed her two girls every afternoon before dinner. It is also true that she cooked the dinner herself and made their dresses with her own fingers, and that of late years, in the poverty of her drunken master, she had little to dress them with and less to cook. But the resources of the old woman seemed wonderful--to the people round about,--for never were two girls more gorgeously gowned than Helen and Lily. It was humorous, it was pathetic--the way it was done. From old bureau drawers and cedar chests, stored away in the attic and unused rooms of Millwood, where she herself had carefully put them in days long gone--days of plenty and thrift--she brought forth rich gowns of another age, and made them over for Helen and Lily. "Now, this gown was Miss Clara's," she would say as she took out a bundle of satin and old lace. She looked at it fondly--often with tears in her honest black eyes. "Lor', how well I disremember the night she fust wore it--the night of the ball we give to Jineral Jackson when he first come to see old Marster. This flowered silk with pol'naize she wore at the Gov'nor's ball and the black velvet with cut steel I've seed her wearin' at many an' many a dinner here in this very house."