best man----"

Glory drew her breath as with a spasm and threw down the newspaper. How
blind she had been, how vain, how foolish! She had told John Storm that
Drake was only a good friend to her, meaning him to understand that thus
far she allowed him to go and no farther. But there was a whole realm of
his life into which he did not ask her to enter. The "notable persons in
politics and society," "the bridesmaids," these made up his real sphere,
his serious scene. Other women were his friends, companions, equals,
intimates, and when he stood in the eye of the world it was they who
stood beside him. And she? She was his hobby. He came to her in his off
hours. She filled up the under side of his life.

With a crushing sense of humiliation she was folding up the newspaper to
send it downstairs when her eye was arrested by a paragraph in small type
in the corner. It was headed "Shocking occurrence at a fashionable
wedding."

"Oh, good gracious!" she cried. A glance had shown her what it was. It
was a report of Polly's suicide.

"At a fashionable wedding at a West-End church on Saturday" (no names) "a
young woman who had been sitting in the nave was seen to rise and attempt
to step into the aisle, as if with the intention of crushing her way out,
when she fell back in convulsions, and on being removed was found to be
dead. Happily, the attention of the congregation was at the moment
directed to the bride and bridegroom, who were returning from the vestry
with the bridal party behind them, and thus the painful incident made no
sensation among the crowded congregation. The body was removed to the
parish mortuary, and from subsequent inquiries it transpired that death
had been due to poison self-administered, and that the deceased was
Elizabeth Anne Love (twenty-four), of no occupation, but formerly a
nurse--a circumstance which had enabled her to procure half a grain of
liquor strychninae on her own signature at a chemist's where she had
been known."

"O God! O God!" Glory understood everything now. "I've a great mind to go
to All Saints' and shame them--Oh, it isn't the police I'm afraid of."
Polly's purpose was clear. She had intended to fall dead at the feet of
the bride and bridegroom and make them walk over her body. Poor, foolish,
ineffectual Polly! Her very ghost must be ashamed of the failure of her
revenge. Not a ripple of sensation on Saturday, and this morning only a
few obscure lines in little letters!

Oh,