ed
the room accompanied by Ellen, the Brights' old servant, who had been in
the household since Jessica's babyhood. They were pretty, dark-haired
children, cousins of Jessica's, and wore white lace frocks over pale
green silk. On their heads were wreaths of tiny double white daisies and
they carried small baskets filled to overflowing with the same flower.

Quietly the little procession began to form. Nora, as matron of honor,
followed the flower girls. She wore her wedding gown of white satin, and
carried a huge armful of white roses. Then came the bride. As Grace had
said Jessica would, in all probability, never look lovelier than in her
wedding dress of white satin. Her veil of wonderful yellow-white old
lace, was an heirloom, Jessica being the fourth bride in the family to
wear it, and her bouquet was a shower of lilies of the valley. Jessica
possessed a dazzlingly white skin, and the purity of her complexion had
never showed to better advantage. Her deeply blue eyes were dark with
reverence and her whole face radiated a tender happiness that made it
rarely lovely. The bridesmaids wore gowns of white chiffon over pale
green chiffon which blended into a misty, sea-foam effect. Dainty
girdles of palest green satin and exquisite hair ornaments composed of
tiny chiffon flowers and satin leaves, together with white satin
slippers and white silk stockings, completed their costumes, and they
carried shower bouquets of white sweet peas.

Down the stairs swept the bridal procession to the strains of
Mendelssohn's wedding march played by the orchestra, stationed in a
palm-screened corner of the wide hall. It was the same old orchestra
which had become so closely identified with the good times of the Eight
Originals during their high school days. Jessica had declared laughingly
that it would seem almost a sacrilege to think of being married to the
strains of a wedding march that was not played by them. At the foot of
the stairs the bride was met by her father, and the wedding party moved
slowly into and down the long parlor to the bow window at the end of the
room which had been transformed into a fairy bower of green. Before a
bank of ferns, white roses and white sweet peas stood the old clergyman
who had said the last solemn words over Jessica's mother years before,
and who had come from another city, many miles distant, to marry Jessica
and Reddy. Here it was that the bridegroom, accompanied by his best man,
Tom Gray, awai