The ceremony had been brief and the guests few. Original Sin, looking particularly hypocritical in his crackling high-church robes, officiated. Although none there was to give away the spirit bride, the lack was dismissed with the groom’s remark that, thanks to his inside knowledge of how to force the affections female, she was her own free gift. Perhaps never in all marriages of convenience on Earth had sounded so sacrilegious the transposed lines of the service. Would Dolores take Satan to love, honor and obey, from everlasting to everlasting, until he himself did them part? She would. And would Satan do his damnedest to love and cherish Dolores? Hell helping him, he would. Almost before her change of estate could be realized, she who had been despised of men stood before the Lower World with a crown upon her head and a scepter in her hand. Her lord’s first marital word had been a complaint. Why hadn’t she worn the glittering amethystine costume which he had ordered as her bridal robe? Did she think herself still the shopgirl who had walked, once upon a time, into Vincent Seff’s “slaughter of the innocents” that she should come to her nuptials unadorned by any of the stage jewelry which he had heaped upon her? Or had her late-learned humor dictated her dress of virgin white? She suspected indulgence, if not actual approval, behind his show of displeasure. Himself he had arrayed faultlessly in cutaway effect. His two departures from Earth’s accepted mode lay in a scarlet cravat and his _boutonnière_. In lieu of the conventional orange-blossom bud, he wore a tiny illuminated nectarine. As to so many women-souls before her sacrificed upon the matrimonial altar, the subsequent feast was to Dolores a tedious affair. Toasted in varied high-volt mixtures, praised for her vices in the retroactive terms of the damned, applauded uproariously for her inability to make brazen reply as the arch-mistress of deceit, she had striven through course after course to keep up appearances. What though in the illusion of passion flowers that banked the board as a centerpiece she saw only the reproach in the dark eyes of John Cabot? What though her only taste from the adroit food-phantasies was the unsatisfying reminder that she must not regret her deception--must not allow herself to long for him, lest her thought-clutch deter him from the brave deeds that he must do? What though the only spirituous effect of the wine she quaffed was the realization that, with every half-hour now, the little party saved by her surrender must be nearer that boundary over which not even the Prince of the Power of the Air might recall them? With her black demi-watt she sipped the conviction that, in the emergency, she had done the best she could; with her electro-cordial frappé, the hope that already John might understand--that all might yet be well.