"Look in that box on my dressing-table." Dade picked her way through the disorder of the room to the little dressing-table, with its candles lighted, adding their heat to the room. She looked, and found nothing. Then she flew from the room, crossed the hall, and returning, gave Emily a silver dime. "I'll lend it to you," she said, "it'll be something borrowed, too." It was all arranged. The bride glanced again in her mirror, turned about, inspected her train, preened herself like some white bird, ready for final flight. The old maid scanned the bride's face critically. It was radiant, but-- "I'm red as a beet!" Emily pouted. "It's hot as pepper in here anyway," one of the bridesmaids panted. The old maid took a powder puff and touched the bride's face, touched the cheeks, and at last the forehead, where tiny drops of perspiration sparkled. "There now," she said, with her last dab. Emily turned to her with a final glance of questioning. The old dressmaker's eye lighted at the sight of the young girl in her bridal dress. She took a step toward her, her thin, withered lips trembling. "May I--kiss you?" she asked, timidly. And then, carefully, reverently, as she had crowned her with the veil, she approached, and kissed her. The eyes of the bridesmaids, in the emotion that weddings excite in girls, became moist with tears. There were, of course, further feminine delays, but at last, gathering their rustling skirts about their ankles, the bride and her retinue made a dazzling white procession down the staircase. Her father awaited her. The caterer and his black men, the cook and old Jasper, the men of the orchestra, all had gathered in the parlor to see her. Emily paused at the foot of the stairs, blocking the procession that was but half descended. She looked at her father with smiling eyes. The old man glanced at her a moment, and then solemnly drew near. When he had taken her fresh and radiant face between the hands that were still ungloved, he kissed her, and then turned suddenly and went back to his library scrubbing his face with his handkerchief. So the sadness that weddings inspire, possibly because the estate of matrimony is entered into by all lightly and with merry confidence in a future that shall be miraculously exempt from the griefs and woes of life, fell upon the little company.