It was as Godfrey said, Alice was to be _Rev. Mrs. Marks_, and live at the Ridge House, which her money bought, and the fitting up of which she came to superintend a few days after the story was out. She had written to me asking permission to stop with us while she remained in Hampstead, and I was expecting the little lady, when both Gertie and Godfrey interfered, and begged so hard for her to stop with them that she yielded to their entreaties and went to Schuyler Hill, where Godfrey nearly teased her life out of her, and was far more attentive to her than he had been during the short period of his engagement. Even Mr. Marks himself was scarcely more interested than Godfrey in the house, which Alice furnished in accordance with her own extravagant notions. “It was not as if she was poor and dependent upon her husband’s salary,” she said, and so she made a little palace of a home for her future lord, who assented to whatever she suggested, and seemed so excited and absent-minded after she was gone, that we were glad when toward the last of February a young student from New York came up to officiate at St. Luke’s while the rector took a short vacation. He was absent nearly two weeks,—and when he came back to us Alice was with him, and astonished us all with her wonderful outfit, her tall ruffs which reached to her ears, dresses which trailed a yard, sleeveless jackets of every device and color, and her hair, gotten up in a most remarkable manner. She said that she married _Mr. Marks_, and not _his people_, consequently nothing more must be expected of her as Mrs. Marks than she had been willing to render as Miss Creighton. But Alice was fond of “running things,” as Godfrey called it, and she had not been with us a month before she was head and front of the sewing-school for the poor children, and first manager of the Church Home, and secretary of the temperance club for the young men of the working class, and had established a reading room which she controlled entirely. Indeed she seemed in a fair way to revolutionize the town; and though she never approached to anything like familiarity with her husband’s parishioners, she was far more popular and better liked as Mrs. Marks than she had been as Alice Creighton, and when at the Easter festival several children were baptized three of them took her name, Alice Creighton Marks! Some time in March there was another wedding at the Hill and Julia was the bride. She had accepted Major Camden, and started at once for his home among the pines of Carolina. All that spring and the ensuing summer Godfrey and Gertie stayed at Schuyler Hill, and when the autumn came they went down to New York and took possession of the handsome house which Miss Rossiter had bought and the colonel furnished for them.