a moment."

Most of the bride's relations lived at a distance, and were busy
people, so it had been arranged that the dinner we'd had in the
middle of the day was to take the place of a dinner afterwards,
and that we should just have a bite after the wedding was over,
and then that everybody should go home, and the young couple
would walk down to the cottage by themselves. When I looked out I
could see the light burning brightly in Jack's cottage, a quarter
of a mile away. I said I didn't think I could get any train to
take me back before half-past nine, but Mrs. Brewster begged me
to stay until it was time, as she said her daughter would want to
take off her wedding dress before she went home; for she had put
on something white with a wreath, that was very pretty, and she
couldn't walk home like that, could she?

So when we had all had a little supper the party began to break
up, and when they were all gone Mrs. Brewster and Mamie went
upstairs, and Jack and I went out on the piazza, to have a
smoke, as the old lady didn't like tobacco in the house.

The full moon had risen now, and it was behind me as I looked
down toward Jack's cottage, so that everything was clear and
white, and there was only the light burning in the window. The
fog had rolled down to the water's edge, and a little beyond, for
the tide was high, or nearly, and was lapping up over the last
reach of sand, within fifty feet of the beach road.

Jack didn't say much as we sat smoking, but he thanked me for
coming to his wedding, and I told him I hoped he would be happy;
and so I did. I dare say both of us were thinking of those
footsteps upstairs, just then, and that the house wouldn't seem
so lonely with a woman in it. By and by we heard Mamie's voice
talking to her mother on the stairs, and in a minute she was
ready to go. She had put on again the dress she had worn in the
morning, and it looked black at night, almost as black as Jack's
coat.

Well, they were ready to go now. It was all very quiet after the
day's excitement, and I knew they would like to walk down that
path alone now that they were man and wife at last. I bade them
good-night, although Jack made a show of pressing me to go with
them by the path as far as the cottage, instead of going to the
station by the beach road. It was all very quiet, and it seemed
to me a sensible way of getting married; and when Mamie kissed
her mother good-night I just looked the other way, and knocked