y, with
her unconquerable beam.

And a few moments later she added:

"Cally, I was just thinking--no harm in being forehanded, as I always
say!... Considering all the circumstances, what would you say to a
small, dignified home-wedding, with two or four bridesmaids, and a large
breakfast to the most intimate friends?"

Cally was even more amused....

There hovered over her in this moment, however clearly she knew it, an
immense pressure, born both within and without--pressure of her own
lifelong mental habits and ideals, of her parents' wishes, strengthened
by the family's late loss of prestige, pressure of public opinion, of
orthodox standards, of manifest destiny, of the whole air she
breathed--driving her, quite irrespective of the heart question,
straight to brilliant success in Hugo's waiting arms. The wing of this
vast body brushed Cally's cheek now, in mamma's cooing notes. She felt
it, but only smiled. A new strength possessed her; she was her own girl
now as never before.

"I'll give the suggestion due thought, mamma dear ... I've an engagement
now."

Annie knocked, announcing Mr. Avery. Cally was now fully accoutred, in a
small, queer hat, and a short queer wrap, draping in fantastically above
the knee and made of a strange filmy material which might have been
stamped chiffon. She turned, laughing, at the bedroom door, and her
mother, no sentimentalist, thought that she looked extraordinarily
pretty....

"Good-night, mamma.... _Be sure to remember me to Hugo._"

She went off to a merry evening in which her high spirits became a
matter of remark, and her friend Evey McVey considered that they were
the least bit out of taste--"so soon, you know." So Hugo Canning spent
the evening of his return formally reinstating himself in the good
graces of papa, who did not forget his daughter's unhappiness of the
summer quite so easily as mamma....

But next day Hugo had his innings, according to Mrs. Heth's desire.

He had been in Washington, and had come to Carlisle upon an irresistible
impulse. Steadily magnetized by the spirit of the "wild, sweet thing"
who had withstood him at the price of his hand, yearning had once more
conquered pride, and again he had returned, again an astonishment to
himself. In view of such abasement of his self-love, he had, truth to
tell, expected to find Carlisle fully ready for the immediate rejoining
of their lives. But perhaps there had lingered in him a doubt of the
quality