Kitty Craig was just married; and the white satin and fleecy lace, in which she had looked so much like an angel that her great, handsome giant of a husband hardly dared to touch her, was folded and packed away in one of the trunks which stood in the hall waiting the arrival of the express wagon which was to take them to the train. And Kitty in her traveling-dress looked infinitely prettier and more approachable than she had in all that sheen of lace, and satin and flowers, which had cost so much money and discussion, the mother and aunties saying that it was a useless expense, as were nearly all such bridal dresses, when the bride was neither wife nor daughter of a millionaire—that in nine cases out of ten the costly fabric was worn only at the altar and then laid aside to fade and grow yellow with time, or at best to be made over after a lapse of years, when there arose some occasion which demanded it. Kitty, on the contrary, knew she should need it, for was she not going to New York, the very “hub” of parties, and receptions and society, and though she did not know an individual there, and might, as her quaint old aunt expressed it, be at first “a rat among cats,” instead of “a cat among rats,” as she had hitherto been, she should soon have troops of friends, for was not John the confidential clerk in a first-class wholesale house on Broadway, and already acquainted with the wives of his employers, Messrs. Orr, Guile and Steele, and as each of these ladies was in her way a star, would they not be the _sesame_ through which Kitty would enter society, and eventually become a _cat_. There was Mrs. Orr, the wife of the senior partner, a handsome matron, who rolled in gold—name, house and person, all golden—and telling of the dollars her husband counted by the millions. John knew her, and had once been invited to dine with her on Sunday, and in his next letter to Kitty had delighted her with a description of the dinner, at which Mrs. Orr presided in satin dress of golden-brown, with diamonds in her ears, and where her daughter, Miss Elinor Orr, wore natural camellias in her hair and talked French to her mother all the time. Then there was Mrs. Guile, a second wife, and a dashing brunette, whose servants did not speak a word of English, and at whose house John had once taken tea on a Sunday night, when his fine baritone voice was wanted in a quartette of music which followed in the evening.