At that name, he moved so that her arm dropped from his; but she did not connect her maid with her former bosom friend.

“I got to thinking about those who are not so well off as we,” she went on; “about the poor.  And so, I’ve asked papa to give all his employees and the servants nice presents, and I’ve sent five thousand dollars to be divided among the churches in the town, down there—­for the poor.  Do you think I did wrong?  I’m always afraid of encouraging those kind of people to expect too much of us.”

She had asked that he might echo the eulogies she had been bestowing upon herself.  But he disappointed her.  “Oh, I guess it was well enough,” he replied.  “I must go down to the pavilion.  I’m fagged, and you must be, too.”

The suggestion that he might not be looking his best on the morrow was enough to change the current of her thoughts.  “Yes, do, dear!” she urged.  “And don’t let Tom and Harry and the rest keep you up.”

They did not even see him.  He sat in the shed at the end of the boat-landing, staring out over the lake until the moon set.  Then he went to the pavilion.  It was all dark; he stole in, and to bed, but not to sleep.  Before his closed but seeing eyes floated a vision of two women—­Adelaide as he had last seen her, Theresa as she looked in the mornings, as she had looked that afternoon.

He was haggard next day.  But it was becoming to him, gave the finishing touch to his customary bored, distinguished air; and he was dressed in a way that made every man there envy him.  As Theresa, on insignificant-looking little Bill Howland’s arm, advanced to meet him at the altar erected under a canopy of silk and flowers in the bower of lilies and roses into which the big drawing-room had been transformed, she thrilled with pride. There was a man one could look at with delight, as one said, “My husband!”

It was a perfect day—­perfect weather, everything going forward without hitch, everybody looking his and her best, and “Mama” providentially compelled by one of her “spells” to keep to her room.  Those absences of hers were so frequent and so much the matter of course that no one gave them a second thought.  Theresa had studied up the customs at fashionable English and French weddings, and had combined the most aristocratic features of both.  Perhaps the most successful feature was when she and Ross, dressed for the going away, walked, she leaning upon his arm, across the lawns to the silk marquee where the wedding breakfast was served.  Before them, walking backward, were a dozen little girls from the village school, all in white, strewing roses from beribboned baskets, and singing, “Behold!  The bride in beauty comes!”

“Well, I’m glad it’s all over,” said Theresa as she settled back in a chair in the private car that was to take them to Wilderness Lodge, in northern Wisconsin for the honeymoon.

“So am I,” Ross disappointed her by saying.  “I’ve felt like a damn fool ever since I began to face that gaping gang.”