temples,
like a sorrowing priestess with veiled eyes and a depressed soul,
mourning for that which had been. Like the fabled Phoenix, she had risen
from the ashes of her past. To-day she was once more to be seen in her
hereditary position, the brightest gem in all that glorious galaxy of
States which made America the envy of every other nation. Her
battlefields converted into building lots, tall factories smoked where
once a holocaust had flamed, and where cannon had roared you heard
to-day the tinkle of the school bell. Such progress was without a
parallel.

Nor was there any need for him, he was assured, to mention the
imperishable names of their dear homeland's poets and statesmen of
to-day, the orators and philanthropists and prominent business-men who
jostled one another in her splendid, new asphalted streets, since all
were quite familiar to his audience,--as familiar, he would venture to
predict, as they would eventually be to the most cherished recollections
of Macaulay's prophesied New Zealander, when this notorious antipodean
should pay his long expected visit to the ruins of St. Paul's.

In fine, by a natural series of transitions, Colonel Musgrave thus
worked around to "the very pleasing duty with which our host, in view of
the long and intimate connection between our families, has seen fit to
honor me"--which was, it developed, to announce the imminent marriage of
Miss Patricia Stapylton and Mr. Joseph Parkinson.

It may conservatively be stated that everyone was surprised.

Old Stapylton had half risen, with a purple face.

The colonel viewed him with a look of bland interrogation.

There was silence for a heart-beat.

Then Stapylton lowered his eyes, if just because the laws of caste had
triumphed, and in consequence his glance crossed that of his daughter,
who sat motionless regarding him. She was an unusually pretty girl, he
thought, and he had always been inordinately proud of her. It was not
pride she seemed to beg him muster now. Patricia through that moment was
not the fine daughter the old man was sometimes half afraid of. She was,
too, like a certain defiant person--oh, of an incredible beauty, such
as women had not any longer!--who had hastily put aside her bonnet and
had looked at a young Roger Stapylton in much this fashion very long
ago, because the minister was coming downstairs, and they would
presently be man and wife,--provided always her pursuing brothers did
not arrive in time...