IT was not an afternoon for day-dreams, for there was a chill in the air and a gray sky. Only a week before the hills along the river might have been the walls of the New Jerusalem, shining like red gold; now the glory had departed and it was a naked world, with empty nests hanging to boughs that not long ago had been green with summer. The old elm by the tavern, that had been wrapped in a bright trail of scarlet woodbine, was stripped almost bare of its autumn beauty. Here and there a maple showed a remnant of crimson, and a stalwart oak had some rags of russet still clinging to its gaunt boughs. The hickory trees flung out a few yellow flags from the ends of their twigs, but the forests wore a tattered and dishevelled look, and the withered leaves that lay in dried heaps upon the frozen ground, driven hither and thither by every gust of the north wind, gave the unthinking heart a throb of foreboding. Yet the glad summer labor of those same leaves was finished according to the law that governed them, and the fruit was theirs and the seed for the coming year. No breeze had been strong enough to shake them from the tree till they were ready to forsake it. Now they had severed the bond that had held them so tightly and fluttered down to give the earth all their season's earnings. On every hillside, in every valley and glen, the leaves that had made the summer landscape beautiful, lay contentedly:

Brown, withered, dead, buried in snow they might be, yet they were ministering to all the leaves of the next spring-time, bequeathing to them in turn the beauty that had been theirs; the leafy canopies for countless song birds, the grateful shade for man and beast.

Young love thought little of Nature's miracles, and hearts that beat high and fast were warm enough to forget the bleak wind and gathering clouds. If there were naked trees, were there not full barrels of apples in every cellar? If there was nothing but stubble in the frozen fields, why, there was plenty of wheat and corn at the mill all ready for grinding. The cold air made one long for a cheery home and fireside, the crackle of a hearth-log, the bubbling of a steaming kettle; and Patty and Mark clung together as they walked along, making bright images of a life together, snug, warm, and happy.

Patty was a capricious creature, but all her changes were sudden and endearing ones, captivating those who loved her more than a monotonous and unchanging virtue. Any little shower, with Patty, always ended with a rainbow that made the landscape more enchanting than before. Of late her little coquetries and petulances had disappeared as if by magic. She had been melted somehow from irresponsible girlhood into womanhood, and that, too, by the ardent affection of a very ordinary young man who had no great gift save that of loving Patty greatly. The love had served its purpose, in another way, too, for under its influence Mark's own manhood had broadened and deepened. He longed to bind Patty to him for good and all, to capture the bright bird whose fluttering wings and burnished plumage so captured his senses and stirred his heart, but his longings had changed with the quality of his love and he glowed at the thought of delivering the girl from her dreary surroundings and giving her the tenderness, the ease and comfort, the innocent gayety, that her nature craved.

“You won't fail me, Patty darling?” he was saying at this moment. “Now that our plans are finally made, with never a weak point any where as far as I can see, my heart is so set upon carrying them out that every hour of waiting seems an age!”

“No, I won't fail, Mark; but I never know the day that father will go to town until the night before. I can always hear him making his preparations in the barn and the shed, and ordering Waitstill here and there. He is as excited as if he was going to Boston instead of Milltown.”

“The night before will do. I will watch the house every evening till you hang a white signal from your window.”

“It won't be white,” said Patty, who would be mischievous on her deathbed; “my Sunday-go-to-meetin' petticoat is too grand, and everything else that we have is yellow.”

“I shall see it, whatever color it is, you can be sure of that!” said Mark gallantly. “Then it's decided that next morning I'll wait at the tavern from sunrise, and whenever your father and Waitstill have driven up Saco Hill, I'll come and pick you up and we 'll be off like a streak of lightning across the hills to New Hampshire. How lucky that Riverboro is only thirty miles from the state line!—It looks like snow, and how I wish it would be something more than a flurry; a regular whizzing, whirring storm that would pack the roads and let us slip over them with our sleigh-bells ringing!”

“I should like that, for they would be our only wedding-bells. Oh! Mark! What if Waitstill shouldn't go, after all: though I heard father tell her that he needed her to buy things for the store, and that they wouldn't be back till after nightfall. Just to think of being married without Waitstill!”

“You can do without Waitstill on this one occasion, better than you can without me,” laughed Mark, pinching Patty's cheek. “I've given the town clerk due notice and I have a friend to meet me at his office. He is going to lend me his horse for the drive home, and we shall change back the next week. That will give us a fresh horse each way, and we'll fly like the wind, snow or no snow, When we come down Guide Board Hill that night, Patty, we shall be man and wife; isn't that wonderful?”

“We shall be man and wife in New Hampshire, but not in Maine, you say,” Patty reminded him dolefully. “It does seem dreadful that we can't be married in our own state, and have to go dangling about with this secret on our minds, day and night; but it can't be helped! You'll try not to even think of me as your wife till we go to Portsmouth to live, won't you?”

“You're asking too much when you say I'm not to think of you as my wife, for I shall think of nothing else, but I've given you my solemn promise,” said Mark stoutly, “and I'll keep it as sure as I live. We'll be legally married by the laws of New Hampshire, but we won't think of it as a marriage till I tell your father and mine, and we drive away once more together. That time it will be in the sight of everybody, with our heads in the air. I've got the little house in Portsmouth all ready, Patty: it's small, but it's in a nice part of the town. Portsmouth is a pretty place, but it'll be a great deal prettier when it has Mrs. Mark Wilson living in it. We can be married over again in Maine, afterwards, if your heart is set upon it. I'm willing to marry you in every state of the Union, so far as I am concerned.”

“I think you've been so kind and good and thoughtful, Mark dear,” said Patty, more fondly and meltingly than she had ever spoken to him before, “and so clever too! I do respect you for getting that good position in Portsmouth and being able to set up for yourself at your age. I shouldn't wonder a bit if you were a judge some day, and then what a proud girl I shall be!”

Patty's praise was bestowed none too frequently, and it sounded very sweet in the young man's ears.

“I do believe I can get on, with you to help me, Patty,” he said, pressing her arm more closely to his side, and looking down ardently into her radiant face. “You're a great deal cleverer than I am, but I have a faculty for the business of the law, so my father says, and a faculty for money-making, too. And even if we have to begin in a small way, my salary will be a certainty, and we'll work up together. I can see you in a yellow satin dress, stiff enough to stand alone!”

“It must be white satin, if you please, not yellow! After having used a hundred and ten yards of shop-worn yellow calico on myself within two years, I never want to wear that color again. If only I could come to you better provided,” she sighed, with the suggestion of tears in her voice. “If I'd been a common servant I could have saved something from my wages to be married on; I haven't even got anything to be married IN!”

“I'll get you anything you want in Portland to-morrow.”

“Certainly not; I'd rather be married in rags than have you spend your money upon me beforehand!”

“Remember to have a box of your belongings packed and slipped under the shed somewhere. You can't be certain what your father will say or do when the time comes for telling him, and I want you to be ready to leave on a moment's notice.”

“I will; I'll do everything you say, Mark, but are you sure that we have thought of every other way? I do so hate being underhanded.”

“Every other way! I am more than willing to ask your father, but we know he would treat me with contempt, for he can't bear the sight of me! He would probably lock you up and feed you on bread and water. That being the state of things, how can I tell our plans to my own father? He never would look with favor on my running away with you; and mother is, by nature, set upon doing things handsomely and in proper order. Father would say our elopement would be putting us both wrong before the community, and he'd advise me to wait. 'You are both young'—I can hear him announcing his convictions now, as clearly as if he was standing here in the road—'You are both young and you can well afford to wait until something turns up.' As if we hadn't waited and waited from all eternity!”

“Yes, we have been engaged to be married for at least five weeks,” said Patty, with an upward glance peculiar to her own sparkling face,—one that always intoxicated Mark. “I am seventeen and a half; your father couldn't expect a confirmed old maid like me to waste any more time. But I never would do this—this—sudden, unrespectable thing, if there was any other way. Everything depends on my keeping it secret from Waitstill, but she doesn't suspect anything yet. She thinks of me as nothing but a child still. Do you suppose Ellen would go with us, just to give me a little comfort?”

“She might,” said Mark, after reflecting a moment. “She is very devoted to you, and perhaps she could keep a secret; she never has, but there's always a first time. You can't go on adding to the party, though, as if it was a candy-pull! We cannot take Lucy Morrill and Phoebe Day and Cephas Cole, because it would be too hard on the horse; and besides, I might get embarrassed at the town clerk's office and marry the wrong girl; or you might swop me off for Cephas! But I'll tell Ellen if you say so; she's got plenty of grit.”

“Don't joke about it, Mark, don't. I shouldn't miss Waitstill so much if I had Ellen, and how happy I shall be if she approves of me for a sister and thinks your mother and father will like me in time.”

“There never was a creature born into the world that wouldn't love you, Patty!”

“I don't know; look at Aunt Abby Cole!” said Patty pensively. “Well, it does not seem as if a marriage that isn't good in Riverboro was really decent! How tiresome of Maine to want all those days of public notice; people must so often want to get married in a minute. If I think about anything too long I always get out of the notion.”

“I know you do; that's what I'm afraid of!”—and Mark's voice showed decided nervousness. “You won't get out of the notion of marrying me, will you, Patty dear?”

“Marrying you is more than a 'notion,' Mark,” said Patty soberly. “I'm only a little past seventeen, but I'm far older because of the difficulties I've had. I don't wonder you speak of my 'notions.' I was as light as a feather in all my dealings with you at first.”

“So was I with you! I hadn't grown up, Patty.”

“Then I came to know you better and see how you sympathized with Waitstill's troubles and mine. I couldn't love anybody, I couldn't marry anybody, who didn't feel that things at our house can't go on as they are! Father has had a good long trial! Three wives and two daughters have done their best to live with him, and failed. I am not willing to die for him, as my mother did, nor have Waitstill killed if I can help it. Sometimes he is like a man who has lost his senses and sometimes he is only grim and quiet and cruel. If he takes our marriage without a terrible scene, Mark, perhaps it will encourage Waitstill to break her chains as I have mine.”

“There's sure to be an awful row,” Mark said, as one who had forecasted all the probabilities. “It wouldn't make any difference if you married the Prince of Wales; nothing would suit your father but selecting the man and making all the arrangements; and then he would never choose any one who wouldn't tend the store and work on the farm for him without wages.”

“Waitstill will never run away; she isn't like me. She will sit and sit there, slaving and suffering, till doomsday; for the one that loves her isn't free like you!”

“You mean Ivory Boynton? I believe he worships the ground she walks on. I like him better than I used, and I understand him better. Oh! but I'm a lucky young dog to have a kind, liberal father and a bit of money put by to do with as I choose. If I hadn't, I'd be eating my heart out like Ivory!”

“No, you wouldn't eat your heart out; you'd always get what you wanted somehow, and you wouldn't wait for it either; and I'm just the same. I'm not built for giving up, and enduring, and sacrificing. I'm naturally just a tuft of thistle-down, Mark; but living beside Waitstill all these years I've grown ashamed to be so light, blowing about hither and thither. I kept looking at her and borrowing some of her strength, just enough to make me worthy to be her sister. Waitstill is like a bit of Plymouth Rock, only it's a lovely bit on the land side, with earth in the crevices, and flowers blooming all over it and hiding the granite. Oh! if only she will forgive us, Mark, I won't mind what father says or does.”

“She will forgive us, Patty darling; don't fret, and cry, and make your pretty eyes all red. I'll do nothing in all this to make either of you girls ashamed of me, and I'll keep your father and mine ever before my mind to prevent my being foolish or reckless; for, you know, Patty, I'm heels over head in love with you, and it's only for your sake I'm taking all these pains and agreeing to do without my own wedded wife for weeks to come!”

“Does the town clerk, or does the justice of the peace give a wedding-ring, just like the minister?” Patty asked. “I shouldn't feel married without a ring.”

“The ring is all ready, and has 'M.W. to P.B.' engraved in it, with the place for the date waiting; and here is the engagement ring if you'll wear it when you're alone, Patty. My mother gave it to me when she thought there would be something between Annabel Franklin and me. The moment I looked at it—you see it's a topaz stone—and noticed the yellow fire in it, I said to myself: 'It is like no one but Patty Baxter, and if she won't wear it, no other girl shall!' It's the color of the tip ends of your curls and it's just like the light in your eyes when you're making fun!”

“It's heavenly!” cried Patty. “It looks as if it had been made of the yellow autumn leaves, and oh! how I love the sparkle of it! But never will I take your mother's ring or wear it, Mark, till I've proved myself her loving, dutiful daughter. I'll do the one wrong thing of running away with you and concealing our marriage, but not another if I can help it.”

“Very well,” sighed Mark, replacing the ring in his pocket with rather a crestfallen air. “But the first thing you know you'll be too good for me, Patty! You used to be a regular will-o'-the-wisp, all nonsense and fun, forever laughing and teasing, so that a fellow could never be sure of you for two minutes together.”

“It's all there underneath,” said Patty, putting her hand on his arm and turning her wistful face up to his. “It will come again; the girl in me isn't dead; she isn't even asleep; but she's all sobered down. She can't laugh just now, she can only smile; and the tears are waiting underneath, ready to spring out if any one says the wrong word. This Patty is frightened and anxious and her heart beats too fast from morning till night. She hasn't any mother, and she cannot say a word to her dear sister, and she's going away to be married to you, that's almost a stranger, and she isn't eighteen, and doesn't know what's coming to her, nor what it means to be married. She dreads her father's anger, and she cannot rest till she knows whether your family will love her and take her in; and, oh! she's a miserable, worried girl, not a bit like the old Patty.”

Mark held her close and smoothed the curls under the loose brown hood. “Don't you fret, Patty darling! I'm not the boy I was last week. Every word you say makes me more of a man. At first I would have run away just for the joke; anything to get you away from the other fellows and prove I was the best man, but now' I'm sobered down, too. I'll do nothing rash; I'll be as staid as the judge you want me to be twenty years later. You've made me over, Patty, and if my love for you wasn't the right sort at first, it is now. I wish the road to New Hampshire was full of lions and I could fight my way through them just to show you how strong I feel!”

“There'll be lions enough,” smiled Patty through her tears, “though they won't have manes and tails; but I can imagine how father will roar, and how my courage will ooze out of the heels of my boots!”

“Just let me catch the Deacon roaring at my wife!” exclaimed Mark with a swelling chest. “Now, run along, Patty dear, for I don't want you scolded on my account. There's sure to be only a day or two of waiting now, and I shall soon see the signal waving from your window. I'll sound Ellen and see if she's brave enough to be one of the eloping party. Good-night! Good-night! Oh! How I hope our going away will be to-morrow, my dearest, dearest Patty!”