noon
After two nights of troubled thought , Barry Lapelle had hit upon an extraordinary means to circumvent Rachel Gwyn . With Machiavellian cunning he had devised a way to make Viola his wife without jeopardizing her or his own prospects for the future . No mother , he argued , could be so unreasonable as to disinherit a daughter who had been carried away by force and was compelled to wed her captor rather than submit to a more sinister alternative . Shortly after the noon meal , Kenneth rode up to the old Gwyn house . He found Zachariah beaming on the front door step . `` Yas , suh , -- yas , suh ! '' was the servant 's greeting .