about it is that marriage is the cure-all, and the only cure-all, for
love.

[Illustration: "ALL THAT DAY WAS DESPONDENCY, DEJECTION."]

And Zepherin? A man could better describe his side of that week; for
it, too, has mostly to be described from imagination or experience.
What is inferred is that what Adorine longed and thought and looked
in silence and resignation, according to woman's way, he suffered
equally, but in a man's way, which is not one of silence or
resignation,--at least when one is a man of eighteen,--the last
interview, the near wedding, her beauty, his love, her house in sight,
the full moon, the long, wakeful nights.

He took his pirogue; but the bayou played with his impatience,
maddened his passion, bringing him so near, to meander with him again
so far away. There was only a short prairie between him and ----, a
prairie thick with lily-roots--one could almost walk over their
heads, so close, and gleaming in the moonlight. But this is all only
inference.

The pirogue was found tethered to the paddle stuck upright in the soft
bank, and--Adorine's parents related the rest. Nothing else was found
until the summer drought had bared the swamp.

There was a little girl in the house when we arrived--all else were in
the field--a stupid, solemn, pretty child, the child of a brother. How
she kept away from Adorine, and how much that testified!

It would have been too painful. The little arms around her neck, the