knotted tie, and soft felt hat complete.

In this Bohemian garb Michael Maurice,--as the bride's brother,--had
led his sister up the aisle, and duly surrendered her to Captain Lenox,
R.A., serenely unaware, the while, of censorious side-glances bestowed
upon him by the ascetic-featured chaplain, who had an air of
officiating under protest, of silently asserting his own aloofness from
this hole-and-corner method of procedure. But his attitude was
powerless to affect the exalted emotion of that strange half-hour,
wherein, by the repetition of a few simple, forcible words, a man and
woman take upon themselves the hardest task on earth with a valiant
assurance which is at once pathetic and sublime.

To Quita Maurice, impressionable at all times, the absence of ceremony,
of those trivialities which obscure and belittle the one supreme fact,
gave an added solemnity to the unadorned service: forced upon her a
half-disturbing realisation that she was passing from an independence,
dearer to her than life, into the keeping of a man:--a man of whom she
knew little beyond the fact that he loved her with a strength and
singleness of heart which is the heritage of those who reach life's
summit without indulging in emotional excursions by the way.

And now all needful preliminaries were over; even to the wedding
breakfast, a cheerful, casual meal of cold chicken, iced cake, and a
bottle of champagne, served in Maurice's unpretentious rooms, on the
pastry-cook's second floor.

The scene of their brief courtship lay behind them, dozing in the
golden stillness of late September: before them a footpath climbed
through a forest of pine and fir to the Eiffel Alp Hotel; and on all
sides multitudinous mountains flung heroic contours outward and upward,
to a galaxy of peaks, that glittered diamond-bright upon a turquoise
sky. A mule, ready-saddled, champed his bit at a respectful distance
from the trio: for Lenox, an indefatigable mountaineer, had insisted on
taking the footpath up to the Eiffel; where they would spend ten days,
before crossing into Italy, and so on to Brindisi, _en route_ for his
station in India.

The expiration of his leave, and his determination to take Quita
Maurice back with him, were responsible for the brevity of their
engagement, and for the absence, in both, of that brand-new aspect
which proclaims a bride and bridegroom to an eternally interested world.

For this last Eldred Lenox was abundantly grateful. A