Page:Saxe Holm's Stories, Series Two.djvu/140

130 the woman he has chosen for his wife lives for him, and in him, utterly and absorbingly.

Before snow fell, John and Molly were married. Molly went up from the house on the meadow to the house on the hill to live, and that seemed to be almost the only change, except in the gladness of her heart and John's, and that was a change nobody knew much about except themselves. A little change there was also in Molly's clothes, though not the usual metamorphosis which brides undergo. She was as quiet in her tastes as a Quaker, and the only adornment which she wore when she first went to church as John's wife, was a wreath of small white chrysanthemums in her hat. They were singularly becoming to her fair and rosy face. It cannot be denied that when John first saw them, he started a little, and remembered some he had seen a year before, made of pearls and topazes. But he thought these much prettier than those; and as Fanny Lane had said, "an ox-eye daisy on the farm" prettier than either.

We may not dare in this world to wonder why the sad people live and the happy people die. At times one is so overwhelmed by the terrifying consciousness of this cruel habit of fate, that one hardly dares rejoice at his fullest, for fear of being slain and removed from his joy.

John Bassett and his dear and beloved wife, "little Molly," lived together only one short year. Then with his own hands he laid her and their