Madam Schuyler was relieved to the point of genuine cheerfulness, over this, despite the cloud of tragedy that hung over the day. She began to talk to Marcia as if she had been Kate, as she smoothed down this and that article and laid them back in the trunk, telling how the blue gown would be the best for church and the green silk for going out to very fine places, to tea-drinkings and the like, and how she must always be sure to wear the cream undersleeves with the Irish point lace with her silk gown as they set it off to perfection. She recalled, too, how little experience Marcia had had in the ways of the world, and all the while the girl was being dressed in the dainty bridal garments she gave her careful instructions in the art of being a success in society, until Marcia felt that the green fields and the fences and trees to climb and the excursions after blackberries, and all the joyful merry-makings of the boys and girls were receding far from her. She could even welcome Hanford Weston as a playfellow in her new future, if thereby a little fresh air and freedom of her girlhood might be left. Nevertheless there gradually came over her an elation of excitement. The feel of the dainty garments, the delicate embroidery, the excitement lest the white slippers would not fit her, the difficulty of making her hair stay up in just Kate’s style—for her stepmother insisted that she must dress it exactly like Kate’s and make herself look as nearly as possible as Kate would have looked,—all drove sadness from her mind and she began to taste a little delight in the pretty clothes, the great occasion, and her own importance. The vision in the looking-glass, too, told her that her own face was winsome, and the new array not unbecoming. Something of this she had seen the night before when she put on her new chintz; now the change was complete, as she stood in the white satin and lace with the string of seed pearls that had been her mother’s tied about her soft white throat. She thought about the tradition of the pearls that Kate’s girl friends had laughingly reminded her of a few days before when they were looking at the bridal garments. They had said that each pearl a bride wore meant a tear she would shed. She wondered if Kate had escaped the tears with the pearls, and left them for her. She was ready at last, even to the veil that had been her mother’s, and her mother’s mother’s before her. It fell in its rich folds, yellowed by age, from her head to her feet, with its creamy frost-work of rarest handiwork, transforming the girl into a woman and a bride.