e stood in a
chatting group of wedding attendants just outside the door of Christ
Church.

"I think she's the loveliest thing I've ever seen," declared another
girl. "Anne has a distinction that's positively royal. Don't you think
so, Reed?"

The young man addressed, after a half hour's deprivation inside the
church, was hastening to avail himself of a cigarette. With a match
close to his lips he grunted, and then having inhaled and exhaled, he
supplemented the incoherent affirmative. "You're both right. As for
myself, I'd rather have my bride's royalty less suggestive of Marie
Antoinette riding in a tumbril. I don't like to have it brought home to
me that marriage is life's supreme sacrifice."

Anne herself, sitting beside Morgan Wallifarro as they drove home, was
rather breathless in her silence. Today it had been the rehearsal, but
tomorrow it would be the ceremony itself, and from that there would be
no turning back. An intolerable sense of inevitability seemed to close
and darken in a stifling oppression that left her faint.

Until now she had been telling herself, as one will tell oneself
specious things to prop a tottering resolution, that the ghosts of
incertitude and panic would hold dominion only over the days and weeks
of waiting. If she could keep her courage steadfast until she had
actually become Morgan's wife, the forces that support one in one's duty
would rally in closer order to uphold her.

But there in the church, going through the formula of the rehearsal,
that fallacious self-bolstering had collapsed, and the misgivings of
these days stood revealed as prefatory only to a more permanent and
chafing thraldom.

If Boone had been there she felt that there was no law within herself
strong enough to have prevented her from fleeing to him--and terror had
seized upon her.

Then it was that the something came into her eyes which the
maid-of-honour had described as the appearance of one seeing ghosts.

Morgan owed every success in life, or at least attributed every success,
to his refusal to admit the possibility of failure. Like the Nervii, "he
was strong because he seemed strong." Anne had brought him, at times,
close to an acknowledgment of defeat in his paramount resolve--but his
perseverance, he believed, had conquered, and his fears were over.

Now he looked into a face from which the colour had ebbed and in which
the eyes were far from radiant--but Morgan told himself that it should
be his