e gasped; he sought for
words.

"Why, you--you--" he cried. "You--you sooty-faced little girl!"

In this fashion he directly addressed Miss Mary Randolph Kirsted for the
first time in his life.

And that was the strangest thing of this strange evening. Strangest
because, as with life itself, there was nothing remarkable upon the
surface of it. But if M. Maeterlinck has the right of the matter, and
if the bright air of that June evening, almost eleven years in the
so-called future, was indeed already trembling to "Lohengrin," then
William stood with Johnnie Watson against a great bank of flowers at the
foot of a church aisle; that aisle was roped with white-satin ribbons;
and William and Johnnie were waiting for something important to happen.
And then, to the strains of "Here Comes the Bride," it did--a stately,
solemn, roseate, gentle young thing with bright eyes seeking through a
veil for William's eyes.

Yes, if great M. Maeterlinck is right, it seems that William ought to
have caught at least some eerie echo of that wedding-march, however
faint--some bars or strains adrift before their time upon the moonlight
of this September night in his eighteenth year.

For there, beyond the possibility of any fate to intervene, or of any
later vague, fragmentary memory of even Miss Pratt to impair, there in
that moonlight was his future before him.

He started forward furiously. "You--you--you little--"

But he paused, not wasting his breath upon the empty air.

His bride-to-be was gone.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Seventeen, by Booth Tarkington

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