it!"

To this Miss Toland made no answer except an outraged snort, and a
closer pressure of her fine, bony hand upon Julia's warm little fingers.
They presently reached the church, and Julia was in Barbara's hands.

"You look lovely, darling, and your hat is a dream!" said Barbara, who
looked very handsome herself, in her brown suit and flower-trimmed hat.
"We go upstairs, I think. Jim's here, nervous as a _fish_. You're
wonderful--as calm! I'd simply be in spasms. Ted was awful; you'd think
she had been married every day, but Robert--his collar was _wilted_!"

They had reached the upper church now, and Miss Toland and Mrs. Page
followed the girls down the long aisle to the altar. Julia saw her
little old grandmother, in an outrageous flowered bonnet, and Evelyn who
was a most successful modiste now, and Marguerite, looking flushed and
excited, with her fat, apple-faced young husband, and three lumpy little
children. Also her Aunt May was there, and some young people: Muriel,
who was what Evelyn had been at fifteen, and a toothless nine-year-old
Regina, in pink, and some boys. On the other side were the elegant
Tolands, the dear old doctor in an aisle seat, with his hands, holding
his eye-glasses and his handkerchief, fallen on either knee; Ted lovely
in blue, Constance and Jane with Ned and Mrs. Ned, frankly staring.

As Julia came down the aisle, with a sudden nervous jump of her heart,
she saw Jim and Richie, who was limping badly, but without his crutch,
come toward her. The old priest came down the altar steps at the same
time. She and Jim listened respectfully to a short address without
hearing a word of it, and found themselves saying the familiar words
without in the least sensing them. Julia battled through the prayer with
a vague idea that she was losing a valuable opportunity to invoke the
blessing of God, but unable to think of anything but the fact that the
bride usually walked out of church on the groom's arm, and that St.
Charles's aisle was long and rather dismal in the waning afternoon
light.

"Here, darling, in the vestry!" Jim was whispering, smiling his dear,
easy, reassuring smile as he guided her to the nearby door. And in a
second they were all about her, her first kiss on the wet cheek of Aunt
Sanna, the second to her mother--"Evelyn, you were a darling to come way
across the city, and Marguerite, you were a darling to bring those
precious angels"--and then the old doctor's kiss, and Richie's