"We ought ne er to do wrong once folk are looking."

I

The 1st scene is in the country, in Virginia; the time, 1880. There
has been a wedding, between a handsome young man of slender means and a
rich young girl--a case of love at 1st sight and a precipitate
marriage; a marriage bitterly opposed by the girl's unmarried father.

Jacob Fuller, the bridegroom, is twenty-six years old, is of an old but
unconsidered family which had by compulsion emigrated from Sedgemoor, and
for King James's purse's profit, so everybody said--some maliciously the
rest simply because they believed it. The bride is nineteen and
beautiful. She is intense, high-strung, romantic, boundlessly proud of
her Cavalier blood, and ablaze in her love fo