g, tentacular leaves that perpetually swayed with the
slightest breeze with a peculiar beckoning motion.

Trysdale's friend, the brother of the bride, stood at a sideboard
complaining at being allowed to drink alone. Both men were in evening
dress. White favors like stars upon their coats shone through the
gloom of the apartment.

As he slowly unbuttoned his gloves, there passed through Trysdale's
mind a swift, scarifying retrospect of the last few hours. It seemed
that in his nostrils was still the scent of the flowers that had been
banked in odorous masses about the church, and in his ears the
lowpitched hum of a thousand well-bred voices, the rustle of crisp
garments, and, most insistently recurring, the drawling words of the
minister irrevocably binding her to another.

From this last hopeless point of view he still strove, as if it had
become a habit of his mind, to reach some conjecture as to why and how
he had lost her. Shaken rudely by the uncompromising fact, he had
suddenly found himself confronted by a thing he had never before
faced--his own innermost, unmitigated, arid unbedecked self. He saw
all the garbs of pretence and egoism that he had worn now turn to rags
of folly. He shuddered at the thought that to others, before now, the
garments of his soul must have appeared sorry and threadbare. Vanity
and conceit? These were the joints in his armor. And how free from
either she had always been--But why--

As she had slowly moved up the aisle toward the altar he had felt an
unworthy, sullen exultation that had served to support him. He had
told himself that her paleness was from thoughts of another than the
man to whom she was about to give herself. But even that poor
consolation had been wrenched from him. For, when he saw that swift,
limpid, upward look that she gave the man when he took her hand, he
knew himself to be forgotten. Once that same look had been raised to
him, and he had gauged its meaning. Indeed, his conceit had crumbled;
its last prop was gone. Why had it ended thus? There had been no
quarrel between them, nothing--

For the thousandth time he remarshalled in his mind the events of those
last few days before the tide had so suddenly turned.

She had always insisted upon placing him upon a pedestal, and he had
accepted her homage with royal grandeur. It had been a very sweet
incense that she had burned before him; so modest (he told himself); so
childlike and worshipful,