He had owned the only coach and four.  His wife during her short life had gone dressed in rich brocades and satins that rustled loud in the ears of the village women, and her nodding plumes had dazzled the eyes under their modest hoods.  Hardly a woman in the village but could tell—­for it had been handed down like a folk-lore song from mother to daughter—­just what Squire Adams’s wife wore when she walked out first as bride to meeting.  She had been clad all in blue.

“Squire Adams’s wife, when she walked out bride, she wore a blue satin brocade gown, all wrought with blue flowers of a darker blue, cut low neck and short sleeves.  She wore long blue silk mitts wrought with blue, blue satin shoes, and blue silk clocked stockings.  And she wore a blue crape mantle that was brought from over seas, and a blue velvet hat, with a long blue ostrich feather curled over it—­it was so long it reached her shoulder, and waved when she walked; and she carried a little blue crape fan with ivory sticks.”  So the women and girls told each other when the Squire’s bride had been dead nearly seventy years.

The blue bride attire was said to be still in existence, packed away in a cedar chest, as the Squire had ordered after his wife’s death.  “He stood over the woman that took care of his wife whilst she packed the things away, and he never shed a tear, but she used to hear him a-goin’ up to the north chamber nights, when he couldn’t sleep, to look at ’em,” the women told.

People had thought the Squire would marry again.  They said Evelina, who was only four years old, needed a mother, and they selected one and another of the good village girls.  But the Squire never married.  He had a single woman, who dressed in black silk, and wore always a black wrought veil over the side of her bonnet, come to live with them, to take charge of Evelina.  She was said to be a distant relative of the Squire’s wife, and was much looked up to by the village people, although she never did more than interlace, as it were, the fringes of her garments with theirs.  “She’s stuck up,” they said, and felt, curiously enough, a certain pride in the fact when they met her in the street and she ducked her long chin stiffly into the folds of her black shawl by way of salutation.

When Evelina was fifteen years old this single woman died, and the village women went to her funeral, and bent over her lying in a last helpless dignity in her coffin, and stared with awed freedom at her cold face.  After that Evelina was sent away to school, and did not return, except for a yearly vacation, for six years to come.  Then she returned, and settled down in her old home to live out her life, and end her days in a perfect semblance of peace, if it were not peace.