Mother, we have gone to be married. It could not wait, you see.

The luncheon meal was hastily set and quickly taken, and the hot hours of the afternoon stretched wider in the dreadful silence of the House. Not a guest took a boat upon the water, so it was largely still, save for the fishermen. Late in the afternoon, Mama and Papa retired upstairs, and I remained upon the piazza, where we had been sitting. For a long while, I stared at the harbor, unable to cease from watching the flat sheen of water before me, as if there lay the answers. What had happened? I tried and tried to envision Halcy and Henry in the dark—secretly meeting, clasped together, setting out across the water. To marry? Marry where? Where were they fleeing to on a windless night?

And there my mind stuck—or rather, my mind could not see true. For it was Halcy as Maggie Tulliver I imagined, floating along on the treacherous torrent of the Floss; or then the beautiful, dreaming, dead Ophelia faceup among the reeds. The strange ecstasy in their dying faces settled onto Halcy’s—and seemed more real to me somehow than the plain little body I had seen this morning upon the dock.

The laughter of girls burst open behind me, and I turned to see Cynthia Harrington and Ruth Barton had appeared in the doorway as if blown there by a pursuing wind.

Clad in a pale green dress, unadorned save for the pearl buttons at her neck, Cynthia dashed forward, alighting herself first beside me on the settee, then rising to perch upon the wooden balustrade. The more substantial Miss Barton chose a single wicker chair and settled herself right down. There was one moment of quiet as we sat in the light shade of the piazza and watched the seagulls trail after the fishing boats in the bright open sky.

“I would like to be married out by the lighthouse,” Cynthia burst out, her eyes turned toward the tip of the breakwater, and as she turned to look first at Ruth, then at me, her hair brushed past one cheek and then the other, a very drama of revealing and concealing, which, had I been a man, I might have found entrancing.

“Outside!” Ruth exclaimed. “Why, only animals couple outside—you might just as well wish to be married in a barn!” And the dreadful girl’s nose crinkled in scornful merriment. “After all, where would God be if you said your vows outside, or anywhere, for that matter, but in a church?”

“God?” Cynthia turned suddenly serious eyes on her friend. “God is the all outdoors.”