Oh, nothing can travel quickly over a bayou!  Ask any one who has waited on a bayou-bank for a physician or a life-and-death message.  Thought refuses to travel and turn and double over it; thought, like the eye, takes the shortest cut—­straight over the sea-marsh; and in the spring of the year, when the lilies are in bloom, thought could not take a more heavenly way, even from beloved to beloved.

It was the week before marriage, that week when, more than one’s whole life afterward, one’s heart feels most longing—­most—­well, in fact, it was the week before marriage.  From Sunday to Sunday, that was all the time to be passed.  Adorine—­women live through this week by the grace of God, or perhaps they would be as unreasonable as the men—­Adorine could look across the prairie to the little red roof during the day, and could think across it during the night, and get up before day to look across again—­longing, longing all the time.  Of course one must supply all this from one’s own imagination or experience.

But Adorine could sing, and she sang.  One might hear, in a favorable wind, a gunshot, or the barking of a dog from one place to the other, so that singing, as to effect, was nothing more than the voicing of her looking and thinking and longing.

When one loves, it is as if everything was known of and seen by the other; not only all that passes in the head and heart, which would in all conscience be more than enough to occupy the other, but the talking, the dressing, the conduct.  It was then that the back hair was braided and the front curled more and more beautifully every day, and that the calico dresses became stiffer and stiffer, and the white crochet lace collar broader and lower in the neck.  At thirteen she was beautiful enough to startle one, they say, but that was nothing; she spent time and care upon these things, as if, like other women, her fate seriously depended upon them.  There is no self-abnegation like that of a woman in love.

It was her singing, however, which most showed that other existence in her existence.  When she sang at her spinning-wheel or her loom, or knelt battling clothes on the bank of the bayou, her lips would kiss out the words, and the tune would rise and fall and tremble, as if Zepherin were just across there, anywhere; in fact, as if every blue and white lily might hide an ear of him.

It was the time of the new moon, fortunately, when all sit up late in the country.  The family would stop in their talking about the wedding to listen to her.  She did not know it herself, but it—­the singing—­was getting louder and clearer, and, poor little thing, it told everything.  And after the family went to bed they could still hear her, sitting on the bank of the bayou, or up in her window, singing and looking at the moon traveling across the lily prairie—­for all its beauty and brightness no more beautiful and bright than a heart in love.