The white house in the aspens was in gala attire. Flowers—great banks of bloom—were massed in the hall, along the stairway and in the window-seats, and wreaths of delicate fern trembled on the prim-hung chandeliers. Over all breathed the sweet fragrance of jasmin. Musicians sat behind a screen of palms in a corridor, and a long scarlet carpet strip ran down the front steps to the driveway, up which passed bravely dressed folk, arriving in carriages and on foot, to witness the completion of a much-booted romance.

For a fortnight this afternoon's event had been the chat of the town, for David Stires, who to-day retired from active business, was its magnate, the owner of its finest single estate and of its most important bank. From his scapegrace boyhood Hugh Stires had made himself the subject of uncomfortable discussion. His sudden disappearance after the rumored quarrel with his father, and the advent of Jessica Holme, had furnished the community sufficient material for gossip. The wedding had capped this gossip with an appropriate climax. Tongues had wagged over its pros and cons—for Hugh's past had induced a wholesome skepticism of his future. But the carping were willing to let bygones be bygones, and the wiseacres, to whose experience marriage stood as a sedative for the harum-scarum, augured well.

There was an additional element of romance, too, in the situation; for Jessica, who had never yet seen her lover, would see her husband. The great surgeon on whose prognostication she had built so much, had arrived and had operated. He was not alone an eminent consultant in diagnosis, but an operator of masterly precision, whose daring of scalpel had made him well-nigh a last resort in the delicate adventurings of eye surgery. The experiment had been completely successful, and Jessica's hope of vision had become a sure and certain promise.

To see once again! To walk free and careless! To mold the plastic clay into the shapes that thronged her brain! To finish the statue which she had never yet shown to any one, in the great sky-lighted attic! To see flowers, and the sunset, the new green of the trees in spring, and the sparkle of the snow in winter, and people's faces!—to see Hugh! That had been at the core of her thought when it reeled dizzily back from the merciful oblivion of the anesthetic, to touch the strange gauze wrappings on her eyes—the tight bandage that must stay for so long, while nature plied her silent medicaments of healing.

Meanwhile the accepted lover had become the importunate one. The operation over, there had remained many days before the bandages could be removed—before Jessica could be given her first glimpse of the world for nearly three years. Hugh had urged against delay. If he had stringent reasons of his own, he was silent concerning them. And Jessica, steeped in the delicious wonder of new and inchoate sensations, had yielded.

So it had come about that the wedding was to be on this hot August afternoon, although it would be yet some time before the eye-bandages might be laid aside, save in a darkened room. In her girlish, passionate ideality, Jessica had offered a sacrifice to her sentiment. She had promised herself that the first form her new sight should behold should be, not her lover, but her husband! The idea pleased her sense of romance. So, hugging the fancy, she had denied herself. She was to see Hugh for the first time in a shaded room, after the glare and nervous excitement of the ceremony.

Gossip had heard and had seized upon this tidbit with relish. The blind marriage—a bride with hoodwinked eyes, who had never seen the man she was to marry—the moment's imperfect vision of him, a poor dole for memory to carry into the honeymoon—these ingredients had given the occasion a titillating sense of the extraordinary and romantic, and sharpened the buzz of the waiting guests, as they whiled away the irksome minutes.

It was a sweltering afternoon, and in the wide east parlor, limp handkerchiefs and energetic fans fought vainly against the intolerable heat. There, as the clock struck six, a hundred pairs of eyes galloped between two centers of interest: the door at which the bride would enter, and the raised platform at the other end of the room where, prayer-book in hand, in his wide robes and flowing sleeves, Harry Sanderson had just taken his stand. Perhaps more looked at Harry than at the door.

He seemed his usual magnetic self as he stood there, backed by the flowers, his waving brown hair unsmoothed, the ruby-ring glowing dull-red against the dark leather of the book he held. Few felt it much a matter of regret that the humdrum and less personable Bishop of the Diocese should be away at convocation, since the young rector furnished the final esthetic touch to a perfectly appointed function. But Harry Sanderson was far from feeling the grave, alien, figure he appeared. In the past weeks he had waged a silent warfare with himself, bitterer because repressed. The strange new thing that had sprung up in him he had trampled mercilessly under. From the thought that he loved the promised wife of another, a quick, fastidious sense in him recoiled abashed. This painful struggle had been sharpened by his sense of Hugh's utter worthlessness. To that rustling assemblage, the man who was to make those solemn promises was David Stires' son, who had had his fling, turned over his new leaf becomingly, and was now offering substantial hostages to good repute. To him, Harry Sanderson, he was a flÂneur, a marginless gambler in the futures of his father's favor and a woman's heart. He had shrunk from the ceremony, but circumstances had constrained him. There had been choice only between an evasion—to which he would not stoop—and a flat refusal, the result of which would have been a footless scandal—ugly town-talk—a sneer at himself and his motives—a quietus, possibly, to his whole career.

So now he stood to face a task which was doubly painful, but which he would go through with to the bitter end!

Only a moment Harry stood waiting; then the palm-screened musicians began the march, and Hugh took his place, animated and assured, looking the flushed and expectant bridegroom. At the same instant the chattering and hubbub ceased; Jessica, on the arm of the old man, erect but walking feebly with his cane, was advancing down the roped lane.

She was in simple white, the point-lace on the frock an heirloom. Her bronze hair was drawn low, hiding much of the disfiguring bandage, under which her lips were parted in a half-smile, human, intimate and eager, full of the hope and intoxication of living.

Harry's eyes dropped to the opened book, though he knew the office by heart. He spoke the time-worn adjuration with clear enunciation, with almost perfunctory distinctness. He did not look at Hugh.

"If any man can show just cause why they may not lawfully be joined together, let him speak, or else hereafter for ever hold his peace." In the pause—the slightest pause—that turned the page, he felt an insane prompting to tear off his robes, to proclaim to this roomful of heated, gaping, fan-fluttering humanity, that he himself, a minister of the gospel, the celebrant of the rite, knew "just cause"!

The choking impulse passed. The periods rolled on—the long white glove was slipped from the hand, the ring put on the finger, and the pair, whom God and Harry Sanderson had joined together, were kneeling on the white satin prie-dieu with bowed heads under the final invocation. As they knelt, choir voices rose:

Then, while the music lingered, the hush of the room broke in a confused murmur; the white ribbon-wound ropes were let down, and a voluble wave of congratulators swept over the spot. In a moment more Harry found himself laying off his robes in the next room.

With a sigh of relief, he stepped through the wide French window into the garden, fresh with the scent of growing things and the humid odors of the soil. The twitter and bustle he had left came painfully out to him, and a whiff of evening coolness breathed through the oppressive air. The strain over, he longed for the solitude of his study. But David Stires had asked him to remain for a final word, since bride and groom were to leave on an early evening train; the old man was to accompany them a part of the journey, and "the Stires place" was to be closed for an indefinite period. Harry found a bench and sat down, where camelias dropped like blood.

What would Jessica suffer in the inevitable awakening, when the tinted petals of her dreams were shattered and strewn? For the first time he looked down through his sore sense of outrage and protest to deeps in himself—as a diver peers through a water-glass to the depths of a river troubled and opaque, dimly descrying vague shapes of ill. Poetry, passion and dreams had been his also, but he had dreamed too late!

It was not long before the sound of gay voices and of carriage-wheels came around the corner of the house, for the reception was to be curtailed. There had been neither bridesmaids nor groomsmen, and there was no skylarking on the cards; the guests, who on lesser occasions would have lingered to throw rice and old shoes, departed from the house in the aspens with primness and dignity.

One by one he heard the carriages roll down the graveled driveway. A bicycle careened across the lawn from a side-gate, carrying a bank messenger—the last shaft of commerce before old David Stires washed his tenacious mind of business. A few moments later the messenger reappeared and rode away whistling. A last chime of voices talking together—Harry could distinguish Hugh's voice now—and at length quiet told him the last of the guests were gone. Thinking that he would now see his old friends for a last farewell, he rose and went slowly back through the French window.

The east room was empty, save for servants who were gathering some of the cut flowers for themselves. He stood aimlessly for a few moments looking about him. A white carnation lay at the foot of the dais, fallen from Jessica's shower-bouquet. He picked this up, abstractedly smelled its perfume, and drew the stem through his buttonhole. Then, passing into the next room, he found his robes leisurely and laid them by—he had now only to embellish the sham with his best wishes!

All at once he heard voices in the library. He opened the door and entered.

Harry Sanderson stopped stock-still. In the room sat old David Stires in his wheel-chair opposite his son. He was deadly pale, and his fierce eyes blazed like fire in tinder. And what a Hugh! Not the indolently gay prodigal Harry had known in the past, nor the flushed bridegroom of a half-hour ago! It was a cringing, a hang-dog Hugh now; with a slinking dread in the face—a trembling of the hands—a tense expectation in the posture. The thin line across his brow was a livid pallor. His eyes lifted to Harry's for an instant, then returned in a kind of fascination to a slip of paper on the desk, on which his father's forefinger rested, like a nail transfixing an animate infamy.

"Sanderson," said the old man in a low, hoarse, unnatural voice, "come in and shut the door. God forgive us—we have married Jessica to a common thief! Hugh—my son, my only child, whom I have forgiven beyond all reckoning—has forged my name to a draft for five thousand dollars!"