descended the stairs, and bowled off towards the church in his shiny, seven-passenger car.
And, now, a few streets away, the high-pitched voice of Aunt Abigail was calling up the stairs to the bride.
The girl paused, though she was dressed and ready. Before, in that slender body there had always been an elasticity, delicate yet invigorating and delightful to see. Now she almost seemed to sag—on the brink.
It was so short a step over that doorsill. Over it she had skipped light-heartedly all the years of her life. Why did she hesitate and shrink back now as though a chasm lay beyond?
That it is a momentous step for any maiden when she passes beyond the threshold for the last time, she knew—even when happiness beckons. She had no right to ask greater security than any of the long host that had passed that way, but she could see, on the other side, only spirits of evil lurking for her. And in the room, the dear ghosts of her youth were pleading with faintly discerned hands, waving her back.
Here, on the old walnut bed, she had fallen asleep with the pure dreams of childhood, awaking, as the years went on, to the shy sweet visions of first love. On the bureau lay the pansy pin with the rhinestone heart, which Captain Harve had given her on her tenth birthday; beside it, the red, all too suddenly-ended diary; the high-school pennant on the wall. In the closet stood the slippers her godfather had brought her from Valparaiso or some strange port; and above them, the red Tam, which, in his memories, Ben would
