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After Miss Burton's departure, the young people had the dance to themselves, their elders resuming the avocations and soberer pleasures from which they had been swept by an impulse evoked from their half-forgotten youth. When Van Berg joined Miss Mayhew again, he found her mother and Stanton trying to explain how it all came about.
This slight but very significant episode sent us home in a soberer mind than any of us had anticipated, after the gaudy triumphs of the day.
On the contrary, his eagles took flight with a rapidity suggestive of the old adage that "gold hath wings," and when, long after midnight, he stood upon the deserted street alone with Philip Searle and his reflections, he was a sadder and a soberer man. "Searle, I'm a ruined man." "You'll fight all the better for it," replied Philip, knocking the ashes from his segar.
He did not answer the ecstatic letters so promptly as he answered those which were composed on a soberer key.
So he worked on at his farm harder than ever, and grew soberer and more careworn daily. Rufus had never seemed so near and dear to him as in these weeks when he had lived under the shadow of threatened blindness. The burning of the barn and the strain upon their slender property brought the brothers together shoulder to shoulder.
Next they were gambling, and made not much noise over it at first; but the Indians in due time began to lose to the soberer whites, becoming quarrelsome, and raising a clumsy disturbance, though it was plain the whites had their own way and were feared. The voices rose, and soon there was no moment that several were not shouting curses at once, till Mrs. Clallam stopped her ears.
A gentle zephyr fanned the leaves; and the shadows of the trees, projecting to their utmost length, gave an additional coolness and a soberer tint to the fields through which they passed. The conversation of these innocent and guileless lovers was, as it were, in unison with the placidness of the evening.
The like might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, for instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides.
In fiction this gentleman would have appeared in the melodramatic guise of a spangled tunic, sugar-loaf hat, with party-coloured ribbons, purple or green breeches, and motley hose; but in the witness-box he was in clerical uniform, a long coat and white cravat with corresponding long face and hair, especially at the back of his head. A soberer style of a stage bandit was never seen.
Below ran a dazzling border of shrubs the sumac, which does not wait for the coming of the frost king to put on its royal livery; the sassafras already gleaming with touches of fire; the wild grape as red as the reddest wine, and rioting over all the rich green; the bright wahoo with its graceful clusters of flame-colored berries overrunning its soberer neighbors; the hazel, the pawpaw, the dog-wood, the red-bud, the spice-wood, the sweet-strife, the angelica.
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