it to his cloth."

"Yes," Eva Saint Clair Andrews answered, in an appreciative murmur.
None the less, lacking the training vouchsafed to Catia by the closing
functions of the divinity school, she wondered what the cloth might be,
that it should so outrank good Mrs. Brenton in its claim to social
precedence.

A week later, came the wedding. Even the most carping one of all the
village gossips was ready to agree that it had thrown new lustre over
the entire community, and even shed its beams into the next county
whence certain of the guests had come. There had been many guests and
some unusual costumes. The church had been filled with a wealth of
flowers, chiefly of the home-grown species, until the place reeked with
the spicy odours, not of Araby the blest, but of a kitchen garden, or a
soup bunch.

Beside the village parson, there had been three young clergymen in
attendance and more or less in active service while the nuptial knot
was being tied. Indeed, so many were there of them and so active were
they in their ministrations that poor Mrs. Brenton, down in the front
pew and painfully shiny between her proud maternal tears and the
reflected lustre of her new black satin frock, was never quite certain
in her mind which one of them, in the end, had pronounced her son and
Catia man and wife. For the sake of the ancestral Wheelers, she hoped
it was the broadcloth-coated village parson; but she had her doubts.
Her doubts increased into a positive agony of uneasiness when she
discovered, at the reception later on, that the three young clergymen,
with one consent, had put their waistcoats on hind side before. Had she
conceived the notion that, within the limits of three years, her son
would adopt the same preposterous fashion, she would have believed
herself in readiness for the nearest madhouse. Mercifully, however, so
much was spared her, at that time and for ever after.

The reception itself was a glorious occasion. Practically the entire
village was present, a good half of them in new frocks manufactured by
themselves in honour of the great event. It was now four years and
seven months since there had been a wedding in the village. The local
type of damsel was a pre-natal spinster, and the few village boys went
otherwhere in search of wives. Brides there had been, of course; but
they had been of the ready-made variety. Other communities had had the
glory of the weddings. It was not every day, by any means, that the