irway, and
Mary, pausing at the landing, looked dazedly at her husband, who stood
in the hall below with a dark, middle-aged man whom she had never seen
before.

"Here she is!" Mamma cried joyously. "Richie, come kiss her right this
minute! Ma'y, darling, this is your new papa!"

"WHAT!" said Mary, faintly. But before she knew it the strange man did
indeed kiss her, and then George kissed her, and Mamma kissed her
again, and all three shouted with laughter as they went over and over
the story. Mary, in all the surprise and confusion, still found time to
marvel at the sight of George's radiant face.

"Carter--of all people!" said George, with a slap on the groom's
shoulder. "I loved his dea' wife like a sister!" Mamma threw in
parenthetically, displaying to Mary's eyes her little curled-up fist
with a diamond on it quite the width of the finger it adorned.
"Strangely enough," said Mr. Carter, in a deep, dignified boom, "your
husband and I had never met until to-day, Mrs.--ah, Mary--when-" his
proud eye travelled to the corn-colored figure, "when this young lady
of mine introduced us!"

"Though we've exchanged letters, eh?" George grinned, cutting the wires
of a champagne bottle. For they were about the dining-room table now,
and the bride's health was to be drunk.

Mary, managing with some effort to appear calm, outwardly
congratulatory, interested, and sympathetic; and already feeling
somewhere far down in her consciousness an exhilarated sense of
amusement and relief at this latest performance of Mamma's,--was
nevertheless chiefly conscious of a deep and swelling indignation
against George.

George! Oh, he could laugh now; he could kiss, compliment, rejoice with
Mamma now, he could welcome and flatter Richard Carter now, although he
had repudiated and insulted the one but a few hours ago, and had for
years found nothing good to say of the other! He could delightedly
involve Mary in his congratulations and happy prophecies now, when but
today he had half broken her heart!

"Lovely!" she said, smiling automatically and rising with the others
when the bridegroom laughingly proposed a toast to the firm that might
some day be "Venable and Carter," and George insisted upon drinking it
standing, and, "Oh, of course, I understand how sudden it all was,
darling!" "Oh, Mamma, won't that be heavenly!" she responded with
apparent rapture to the excited outpourings of the bride. But at her
heart was a cold, dull weight, a