from which all remembrance of self seemed to have vanished, looking at her over the bride's bouquet of white roses. If only she had told her then that she understood! If only she had ever really understood until to-night! If only it was not too late to turn back now and gather that plaintive figure, waiting with the white roses, into her arms! The next morning she was up at daybreak, finishing the packing, preparing the house before leaving for church, making the final arrangements for the wedding breakfast. When at last Lucy, with reddened eyes and tightly curled hair, appeared in the pantry while her mother was helping to wash a belated supply of glass and china which had arrived from the caterer's, Virginia felt that the parting was worse even than Harry's going to college. "Mother, I've the greatest mind on earth not to do it." "My pet, what is the matter?" "I can't imagine why I ever thought I wanted to marry! I don't want to do it a bit. I don't want to go away and leave you and father. And, mother, I really don't believe that I love him!" It was so like Lucy after months of cool determination, of perfect assurance, of stubborn resistance to opposition--it was so exactly like her to break down when it was too late and to begin to question whether she really wanted her own way after she had won it. And it was so like Virginia that at the first sign of weakness in her child she should grow suddenly strong and efficient. "My darling, it is only nervousness. You will be better as soon as you begin to dress. Come upstairs and I will fix you a dose of aromatic ammonia." "Do you really think it's too late to stop it?" "Not if you feel you are going to regret it, but you must be very sure that it isn't merely a mood, Lucy." At the first sign that the step was not yet irrevocable, the girl's courage returned. "Well, I suppose I'll have to get married now," she said, "but if I don't like it, I'm not going to live with him." "Not live with your husband! Why, Lucy!" "It's perfectly absurd to think I'll have to live with a man if I find I don't love him. Ask Jenny if it isn't." Ask Jenny! This was her incredible suggestion! This was her reverence for authority, for duty, for the thundering admonitions of Saint Paul! As far as Saint Paul was concerned, he might as well have been the ponderous anecdotal minister in the brick Presbyterian church around the corner. "But Jenny is so--so----" murmured Virginia, and stopped because words failed her. Had Jenny been born in any family except her own, she would probably have described her as "dangerous," but it was impossible to brand her daughter with so opprobrious an epithet. The word, owing to the metaphorical yet specific definition of it which she had derived from the rector's sermons in her childhood, invariably suggested fire and brimstone to her imagination.