On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed--the carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the room--the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following. Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy had told me, she herself was one of Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story. Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap peremptory, confident. "Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door. Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore the mystery and authority of the hour. "Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of." "Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again--a real, weddin'-dress bride. I had to come." Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics. "I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I should think you might--" But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,--as if there were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not sufficiently simple to know it for herself. Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his. "It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you. What do you think of that?" "You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use' to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's _me_. I feel afraid of you--Allen. You're--differ'nt." He laughed tenderly, confidently. "_Boo!_" he said. "Now are you?" "Yes," she answered seriously; "now." "Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house." "Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the house--the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the rug not tacked down." Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the snowy street by the Triangle park: their house. "Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's--just us two by ourselves," Allen said. "_And_ the presents. My!"