But no one smiled at this joke—­the captain, least of all, and as Carrie glanced from him to Malcolm, she felt that her sister had made a happy choice.  The next day ’Lena came, overjoyed to meet Anna, who more than any one else, rejoiced in her good fortune.

“You deserve it all,” she said, when they were alone, “and if Carrie had one tithe of your happiness in store I should be satisfied.”

But Carrie asked for no sympathy.  “It was no one’s business whom she married,” she said; and so one pleasant night in the early spring, they decked her in her bridal robes, and then, white, cold, and feelingless as a marble statue, she laid her hand in Captain Atherton’s, and took upon her the vows which made her his forever.  A few days after the ceremony, Carrie began to urge their immediate departure for California.

“There was no need of further delay,” she said.  “No one cared to see ’Lena married.  Weddings were stupid things, anyway, and her mother could just as well go one time as another.”

At first Mrs. Livingstone hesitated, but when Carrie burst into a passionate fit of weeping, declaring “she’d kill herself if she had to stay much longer at Sunnyside and be petted by that old fool,” she consented, and one week from the day of the marriage they started.  In Carrie’s eyes there was already a look of weary sadness, which said that the bitter tears were constantly welling up, while on her brow a shadow was resting, as if Sunnyside were a greater burden than she could bear.  Alas, for a union without love!  It seldom fails to end in misery, and thus poor Carrie found it.  Her husband was proud of her, and, had she permitted, would have loved her after his fashion, but his affectionate advances were invariably repulsed, until at last he treated her with a cold politeness, far more endurable than his fawning attentions had been.  She was welcome to go her own way, and he went his, each having in San Francisco their own suite of rooms, and setting up, as it were, a separate establishment.  In this way they got on quite comfortably for a few weeks, at the end of which time Carrie took it into her capricious head to return to Maple Grove.  She would never go back to Sunnyside, she said.  And without a word of opposition the captain paid his bills, and started for Kentucky, where he left his wife at Maple Grove, she giving as a reason that “ma could not spare her yet.”

Far different from this were the future prospects of Durward and ’Lena, who with perfect love in their hearts were married, a week after the departure of Captain Atherton for California.  Very proudly Durward looked down upon her as he placed the first husband’s kiss on her brow, and in the soft brown eyes, brimming with tears, which she raised to his face, there was a world of tenderness, telling that theirs was a union of hearts as well as hands.