“Leave the ‘Simeon’ out, do you? Clytem—_Agnes_ doesn’t like it, maybe?” And without waiting for a reply—“Good-evening, Mr. White. I’m just advising Bart here to use up this batch of cards plaguey quick, to make room for ‘Mrs. Ashe _and husband_.’” Mr. White laughed a little and politely. The jest was in miserable taste, but much was pardonable in rich uncles who were self-made men, when they showed a disposition to help make their nephews. A glimmer of like reasoning may have entered Barton’s mind, for he turned an unshadowed brow to the eccentric millionaire. “When that time comes I shall employ you to draw up the articles of separation. White, here, is witness to the agreement.” An hour later, he would not have believed the words had passed his lips. Jest upon such a horror would have seemed profanation to the newly made husband. As the woman who would never again answer to the name of Agnes Welles stood beside him, his were not the only eyes that paid silent homage to her strange beauty—strange, because to the guests, and to the assembled relatives, this phase of one whom most people had hitherto thought only “interesting” and “pleasing,” was new and unexpected. She was but a few inches shorter than her manly partner, and slender to fragility. Straight and supple as a willow-wand, she was ethereal in grace when clad in the misty robes and veil which were the wedding gift of her godmother. Her dark eyes were full of living light, illumining the colorless face into weird loveliness, that belonged neither to feature nor complexion. The short, tense bow of the upper lip, the fine spirited line of the nostrils, the perfect oval of cheek and chin, were always high-bred—some said, haughty. To-night they were chastened into lofty sweetness that was pure womanly. “She might pass for _twenty_-two,” said an audaciously young _débutante_ to a crony just behind Mr. Barton. And—“By George!” thought that astute individual—“the young dog never hinted that his divinity was six years his senior. I should have been surer than ever of receiving that card. Pity! pity! pity! _That’s_ a fault that won’t mend with time.” Agnes knew better than he could have told her what risks the woman takes who consents to marry her junior in years. Early in their acquaintanceship she had contrived to apprise Barton of this disparity. When he declared his love she set it boldly in the foreground of hesitation and demur. “When you are thirty-five, in man’s proudest prime and yet far from the comb of the hill, I shall have begun to go down the other side,” she urged. “You might be able to contemplate the contrast boldly, but could I forgive myself? There may be a suspicion of poetry—pathetic but real—in the idea of an old man’s darling, but an old woman’s pet! _that_ is a theme no painter or poet has dared to handle. The suggestion of grotesqueness is inevitable. Both are to be pitied, but I think the wife needs compassion even more than the man she has made ridiculous.”