've always been! Nothing can ever
change that!"

"Of course you are," she agreed, with a rush of vivid recollections
which brought a curious little smile to her lips. "Now go, my dear boy,
and heaven bless you!"

Half an hour later, standing beside her husband in the flower-fragrant
church, Georgiana watched with a beating heart to see Stuart bear
himself like the man she knew him to be, in spite of all the pomp and
ceremony to which he was such a stranger. She had been half angry, all
the way through the preparations, that Aunt Olivia had insisted on every
last detail of formality and ostentation--or so it had seemed to her, as
unaccustomed as Stuart himself to the great church wedding with its
long processional, its show of bridesmaids and flower girls, its ranks
of ushers, its elaborate music, its pair of distinguished clergymen in
full canonicals. But now, somehow, as the age-old words sounded upon her
ears, it seemed to matter less under what circumstances they were
spoken, so that the answers to the solemn questions came from the hearts
of those who spoke them. And of this she could have no possible doubt.

By and by, when in her turn, back in the festally decorated house, she
came to give the newly married pair her felicitations, she was well
pleased to see Stuart quite himself again, smiling at her with the proud
look of the bridegroom from whom no human being can wrest the prize he
has just secured. And as she noted Jeannette's equally evident happy
content with the man she had married, Georgiana took courage for their
future. Surely--surely--they could go from these scenes of luxury to the
plainer life that awaited them, and miss nothing, so that they took with
them, as they were doing, the one thing needful.

"It's all right, I'm sure it's all right, dears," she said to them, and
she said it again to her husband when they were rushing back to New York
by the first train after the bridal pair had gone.

"Yes, I think it is," he agreed. "It's an interesting experiment, but
not more hazardous than many another in the matrimonial line. If it
succeeds Jeannette will come out a finer woman than she could ever have
been by any other process. It's amusing, though, to see her family.
Evidently they regard her as one lost to the world quite as much as if
she had gone into a convent to take the vows perpetual."

"All but Uncle Thomas. He knows; he understands, little as he says. He
grew up on a farm himself; he to