"Yes, skipped out!" and Mr. Royce crushed his unlighted cigar savagely in his fingers and hurled it through the carriage window. "I haven't the slightest doubt that she deliberately ran away." The sight of his emotion calmed me a little. "At the last moment?" I questioned. "Practically at the last moment--less than an hour before the time set for the ceremony. She was getting ready for it--was in her wedding-dress, in fact. I tell you, Lester----" "Wait," I said, putting out a restraining hand. "Begin at the beginning. What's her name?" "Marcia Lawrence." "And she's the 'ideal' Curtiss imagined he'd found?" "Yes," said Mr. Royce slowly, "and so far as I can judge from what I've seen and heard, she really was as nearly perfect as any woman can be." "Yet she 'skipped out'!" "That's why I'm so upset--she was the last woman in the world to do such a thing!" "Tell me about her," I said. "I don't know very much; but I do know that she wasn't a mere empty-headed chit. She was an accomplished and cultured woman. I've already told you how her beauty affected me." I paused a moment to consider it--I was fairly nonplussed. It seemed incredible that such a woman should, under any conceivable circumstances, deliberately desert her lover at the altar! "And in her wedding-gown!" I murmured, half to myself. "Yes, in her wedding-gown!" repeated our junior, passing his hand feverishly across his eyes. "It's unbelievable! It's--I can't find any word to describe it. I can scarcely believe I'm awake." "Perhaps she found she didn't love him," I suggested. "At the last moment?" "Stranger things have happened." "I don't believe it!' A woman like Marcia Lawrence knows her own heart before she goes that far!" "Suppose we say sudden insanity?" "Well-balanced women don't go mad merely because they're going to get married." "Then she didn't run away," I said. Mr. Royce looked at me quickly. "You mean----" But the carriage stopped with a jolt and the driver jerked open the door. CHAPTER III The Lover's Story I paused, as soon as we reached the pavement, for a look about me. We were evidently in the fashionable quarter of the town. The street was wide, well-kept, and shaded by stately elms. The houses which stretched away on either hand had that spaciousness, that air of dignity and quiet, which bespeaks wealth and leisure. Here was no gaudy architecture, no flamboyant flourish of the newly-rich; rather the evidence of families long-settled in their present surroundings and long-accustomed to the luxuries of a cultured and generous existence.