the past is past; everything is different now. Oh, Guthrie, what it is
to kiss you without feeling that I am doing wrong!"

She kissed him as she said it, pressing him to her. Of course
he kissed her back, but his hands on her waist were rigid, as if he
wore an evening shirt, and was afraid of her crushing the front of it.
She might have noticed this if she had not caught a glimpse of herself
at the moment in a mirror behind him.

"One thing," she said, "I did draw the line at. I positively refused to
wear a cap. I knew--I knew you couldn't have borne THAT!" Holding her
charming head, rippled all over with goldenchestnut curls and coils,
just in front of his eyes, she pleaded for confirmation of this
statement. "You couldn't have stood seeing me in a cap, could you,
Guthrie?" "As far as I can judge," he replied, "nobody asks you to wear
caps these days, whether you're a widow or not. Why, the very
grandmothers go about in yellow fringes and things, pretending they are
thirty or forty, when everybody knows they are twice that, at the
least. When I was a youngster, there used to be old ladies--my mother
was one; but the race has died out."

"I, at any rate, am not an old lady," Mrs Ewing remarked, with a joyous
smile. "My yellow fringes and things are all my own, and so is my
complexion, and so are my teeth."

Her smile widened to reveal their pearly excellence. She took his hand,
and rubbed the back of it on her downy cheek, and laid the palm on her
soft, thick locks. Even yet she did not see that anything was the
matter, confident in her still young beauty, and in the fact that he
now knew for certain that the bulk of her husband's property was hers.