“Where’s Carrie?” Anna said, and John Jr. replied, “In the parlor, with her future spouse. Shall I introduce you?” So saying, he dragged her into the parlor, where she then recoiled in terror as she saw Captain Atherton. “Oh, Carrie!” she exclaimed. “It cannot be——that I see you again!” she added, as she met her sister’s warning look. Another moment and they were in each other’s arms weeping bitterly, the one that her sister should thus throw herself away, and the other, because she was wretched. It was but for an instant, however, and then Carrie was herself again. Playfully presenting Anna to the Captain, she said, “Ain’t I good to take up with what you left!” But no one smiled at this joke—the captain, least of all, and as Carrie glanced from him to Malcolm, she felt that her sister had made a happy choice. The next day ’Lena came, overjoyed to meet Anna, who more than any one else, rejoiced in her good fortune. “You deserve it all,” she said, when they were alone, “and if Carrie had one tithe of your happiness in store I should be satisfied.” But Carrie asked for no sympathy. “It was no one’s business whom she married,” she said; and so one pleasant night in the early spring, they decked her in her bridal robes, and then, white, cold, and feelingless as a marble statue, she laid her hand in Captain Atherton’s, and took upon her the vows which made her his forever. A few days after the ceremony, Carrie began to urge their immediate departure for California. “There was no need of further delay,” she said. “No one cared to see ’Lena married. Weddings were stupid things, anyway, and her mother could just as well go one time as another.”