After that answer about love, Dolly slipped out of her aunt's arms, out of the room, out of the house. It was a quiet country place, and so she merely wrapped a shawl about her head and shoulders, and walked a few paces up the road to a field path across which she struck—a field path leading to the church-yard.
There were no gates and bolts and locks there—cutting off the dead from the living. Dolly swung back the turnstile gate—it had often yielded to her touch before—and entered the enclosure.
Leaning over the spot where her father lay, she—this girl who had never known a mother—whispered her story.
Dolly's best friend was right, I fear, and the girl was a heathen; but this visit to the dead had been a fancy of hers for years. Whenever she was troubled, whenever she was glad, whenever she was in perplexity, whenever a difficult problem had been solved—she carried the trouble, the gladness, the perplexity, the solution to a mound where the grass grew, which the daisies covered, and went away relieved.
A strange creature—destitute of beauty, not in the least like other young ladies, with occasionally a biting tongue—for Mortomley to choose.
Yet he chose her; that was the last act wanting to complete his ruin.
Had he married Leonora Trebasson, she would have made him successful. Her grand nature, her imperial beauty, her strength of character, would have impelled him to deeds of daring; she would have armed him for the battle and insisted on his coming back victorious.
As matters stood, he wooed and won Dolly; he married her in the spring succeeding his first visit to Dassell. When the woods were putting on their earliest robings of delicate green he made her his wife, and Miss Trebasson was principal bridesmaid, and Mr. Henry Werner best man.
So the play I have to recount commenced; how it ended, if you have patience, you shall know.