The ceremony, an abbreviated nuptial mass, was performed by the Reverend P. L. Chapelle of St. Matthew’s. When it was over, Tabor kissed me and then President Arthur stepped up to offer his congratulations. “I have never seen a more beautiful bride,” he exclaimed, shaking my hand. “May I not beg a rose from your bouquet?” Flattered and pleased, I broke off a blossom to fasten in the lapel of his coat while Mama beamed with pleasure. All of my family pushed up next. We kissed and embraced, excited and thrilled. It hardly seemed possible that here we McCourts, all the way from Oshkosh, were about to sit down to supper with the great ones of the nation! After the rest had congratulated us both, folding doors were opened by the servants and we moved into the next chamber to the supper table. The centerpiece was six feet high. A great basin of blossoms held a massive wedding bell of white roses, surmounted by a heart of red roses and pierced by an arrow of violets, shot from a Cupid’s bow of heliotrope. At either end of the long table extending the whole length of the parlor, was a colossal four-leaf clover formed of red roses, white camelias and blue violets, garlanded with smilax. Over a separate table required to support the wedding cake, was a canopy of flowers with trailing foliage. In each corner of the room was a bower of japonicas arranged in duplicate form to the boxes of the Tabor Grand Opera House at home, in Denver. Violets encircled each guest’s place at table and other flowers garlanded the champagne buckets. “It’s like fairyland—or heaven!” Mama whispered to me. Supper was very gay. Everyone celebrated the occasion with hilarity and although President Arthur took his departure at about quarter to eleven, many of the other guests remained until midnight. It was a truly gala feast. This was the first of March. With the next day, scandal broke in the papers. Father Chapelle returned the $200 wedding fee that Tabor had given him and publicly announced that he had been duped by Papa into marrying two divorced persons. “When I asked the bride’s father if he knew of any impediments to the marriage, he clearly answered he did not,” Father Chapelle was quoted as explaining. “To say all in a few words, I was shamefully deceived by the McCourt family.” He also threatened to have the marriage declared illicit by carrying the question to the highest authorities in the Church. Eventually he thought better of it, after Tabor had sent Bill Brush around to pacify him. But Washington buzzed with gossip. The next day a greater sensation occurred when the newspapers got hold of the fact that we had been secretly married six months previously in St. Louis and three months before Tabor’s legal divorce from Augusta. Both Tabor and I publicly denied this because of the political prestige we hoped he would yet win. “Just malice and envy of a great man,” I told reporters.