She awoke to the brief patch of sunlight that smiled into their apartment for about eight minutes of each forenoon.

Alma was at the pretty chore of lifting the trays from a hamper of roses.  She placed a shower of them on her mother’s coverlet with a kiss, a deeper and dearer one, somehow, this morning.

There was a card, and Mrs. Samstag read it and laughed: 

  Good morning, Carrie. 
  Louis.

They seemed to her, poor dear, these roses, to be pink with the glory of the coming of the dawn.

* * * * *

On the spur of the moment and because the same precipitate decision that determined Louis Latz’s successes in Wall Street determined him here, they were married the following Thursday in Lakewood, New Jersey, without even allowing Carrie time for the blue-twill traveling suit.  She wore her brown-velvet, instead, looking quite modish, a sable wrap, gift of the groom, lending genuine magnificence.

Alma was there, of course, in a beautiful fox scarf, also gift of the groom, and locked in a pale kind of tensity that made her seem more than ever like a little white flower to Leo Friedlander, the sole other attendant, and who during the ceremony yearned at her with his gaze.  But her eyes were squeezed tight against his, as if to forbid herself the consciousness that life seemed suddenly so richly sweet to her—­oh, so richly sweet!

* * * * *

There was a time during the first months of the married life of Louis and Carrie Latz when it seemed to Alma, who in the sanctity of her lovely little ivory bedroom all appointed in rose enamel toilet trifles, could be prayerful with the peace of it, that the old Carrie, who could come pale and terrible out of her drugged nights, belonged to some grimacing and chimeric past.  A dead past that had buried its dead and its hatchet.

There had been a month at a Hot Springs in the wintergreen heart of Virginia, and whatever Louis may have felt in his heart of his right to the privacy of these honeymoon days was carefully belied on his lips, and at Alma’s depriving him now and then of his wife’s company, packing her off to rest when he wanted a climb with her up a mountain slope or a drive over piny roads, he could still smile and pinch her cheek.

“You’re stingy to me with my wife, Alma,” he said to her upon one of these provocations.  “I don’t believe she’s got a daughter at all, but a little policeman instead.”

And Alma smiled back, out of the agony of her constant consciousness that she was insinuating her presence upon him, and resolutely, so that her fear for him should always subordinate her fear of him, she bit down her sensitiveness in proportion to the rising tide of his growing, but still politely held in check, bewilderment.

Once, these first weeks of their marriage, because she saw the dreaded signal of the muddy pools under her mother’s eyes and the little quivering nerve beneath the temple, she shut him out of her presence for a day and a night, and when he came fuming up every few minutes from the hotel veranda, miserable and fretting, met him at the closed door of her mother’s darkened room and was adamant.