With a joyous undignified whoop the parsonage girls scrambled to their feet and rushed indoors in a fine Kilkenny jumble. Aunt Grace looked after them, thoughtfully, smiling for a second, and then with a girlish shrug of her slender shoulders she slipped out and followed them inside. The last thing that night, before she said her prayers, Prudence carried a big bottle of witch hazel into the twins' room. Both were sleeping, but she roused Carol, and Lark turned over to listen. "You must bathe your eyes with this, Carol. I forgot to tell you. What would Jerry say if he had a bleary-eyed bridesmaid!" And although the twins grumbled and mumbled about the idiotic nonsense of getting-married folks, Carol obediently bathed the bloodshot eyes. For in their heart of hearts, every one of the parsonage girls held this wedding to be the affair of prime importance, national and international, as well as just plain Methodist. The twins were undeniably lazy, and slept as late of mornings as the parsonage law allowed. So it was that when Lark skipped into the dining-room, three minutes late for breakfast, she found the whole family, with the exception of Carol, well in the midst of their meal. "She was sick," she began quickly, then interrupting herself,--"Oh, good morning! Beg pardon for forgetting my manners. But Carol was sick, Prudence, and I hope you and Fairy are ashamed of yourselves--and auntie, too--for making fun of her. She couldn't sleep all night, and rolled and tossed, and her head hurt and she talked in her sleep, and--" "I thought she didn't sleep." "Well, she didn't sleep much, but when she did she mumbled and said things and--" Then the dining-room door opened again, and Carol--her hair about her shoulders, her feet bare, enveloped in a soft and clinging kimono of faded blue--stalked majestically into the room. There was woe in her eyes, and her voice was tragic. "It is gone," she said. "It is gone!" Her appearance was uncanny to say the least, and the family gazed at her with some concern, despite the fact that Carol's vagaries were so common as usually to elicit small respect. "Gone!" she cried, striking her palms together. "Gone!" "If you do anything to spoil that wedding, papa'll whip you, if you are fifteen years old," said Fairy. Lark sprang to her sister's side. "What's gone, Carrie?" she pleaded with sympathy, almost with tears. "What's gone? Are you out of your head?" "No! Out of my complexion," was the dramatic answer. Even Lark fell back, for the moment, stunned. "Y-your complexion," she faltered. "Look! Look at me, Lark. Don't you see? My complexion is gone--my beautiful complexion that I loved. Look at me! Oh, I would gladly have sacrificed a leg, or an arm, a--rib or an eye, but not my dear complexion!"