dd. It was lovely.
Marcia could not help seeing herself that it was much more becoming than
the way she had arranged it for her marriage, though then she had had the
wedding veil to soften the tightly drawn outlines of her head. She put on
the sheer white embroidered frock then, and as a last touch pinned the bit
of black velvet about her throat with a single pearl that had been her
mother's. It was the bit of black velvet she had worn the night David
came. It gave her pleasure to think that in so far she was conforming to
his suggestion.

She had just completed her toilet when she heard David's step coming up
the walk.

David, coming in out of the sunshine and beholding this beautiful girl in
the coolness and shadow of the hall awaiting him shyly, almost started
back as he rubbed his eyes and looked at her again. She was beautiful. He
had to admit it to himself, even in the midst of his sadness, and he
smiled at her, and felt another pang of condemnation that he had taken
this beauty from some other man's lot perhaps, and appropriated it to
shield himself from the world's exclamation about his own lonely life.

"You have done it admirably. I do not see that there is anything left to
be desired," he said in his pleasant voice that used to make her
girl-heart flutter with pride that her new brother-to-be was pleased with
her. It fluttered now, but there was a wider sweep to its wings, and a
longer flight ahead of the thought.

Quite demurely the young wife accepted her compliment, and then she meekly
folded her little white muslin cape with its dainty frills about her
pretty shoulders, drew on the new lace mitts, and tied beneath her chin
the white strings of a shirred gauze bonnet with tiny rosebuds nestling in
the ruching of tulle about the face.

Once more the bride walked down the world the observed of all observers,
the gazed at of the town, only this time it was brick pavement not oaken
stairs she trod, and most of the eyes that looked upon her were sheltered
behind green jalousies. None the less, however, was she conscious of them
as she made her way to the house of solemn feasting with David by her
side. Her eyes rested upon the ground, or glanced quietly at things in the
distance, when they were not lifted for a moment in wifely humility to her
husband's face at some word of his. Just as she imagined a hundred times
in her girlish thoughts that her sister Kate would do, so did she, and
after what seemed to