been
Ellen's lay a mass of tissue paper, veiling a marvellous gown of brown
and orange shot silk, the colour of the sunburn on her cheeks, which she
was to wear to-morrow when she gave the bride away. In vain had Ellen
protested and said it would look ridiculous if she came down the aisle
with her sister--Joanna had insisted on her prerogative. "It isn't as if
we had any he-cousins fit to look at--I'll cut a better figger than
either Tom or Pete Stansbury, and what right has either of them to give
you away, I'd like to know?" Ellen had miserably suggested Sam Huxtable,
but Joanna had fixed herself in her mind's eye, swaggering, rustling and
flaming up Pedlinge aisle, with the little drooping lily of the bride
upon her arm. "Who giveth this woman to be married to this man?" Mr.
Pratt would say--"I do," Joanna would answer. Everyone would stare at
Joanna, and remember that Arthur Alce had loved her for years before he
loved her sister--she was certainly "giving" Ellen to him in a double
sense.

She would be just as grand and important at this wedding as she could
possibly have been at her own, yet to-night the prospect had ceased to
thrill her. Was it because in this her first idleness she realized she
was giving away something she wanted to keep? Or because she saw that,
after all, being grand and important at another person's wedding is not
as good a thing even as being humble at your own?

"Well, it might have been my own if I'd liked," she said to herself, but
even that consideration failed to cheer her.

She went over to the chest of drawers. On it stood Martin's photograph
in a black velvet frame adorned with a small metal shield on which were
engraved the words "Not lost but gone before." The photograph was a
little faded--Martin's eyes had lost some of their appealing darkness
and the curves of the mouth she had loved were dim.... She put her face
close to the faded face in the photograph, and looked at it. Gradually
it blurred in a mist of tears, and she could feel her heart beating very
slowly, as if each beat were an effort....

Then suddenly she found herself thinking about Ellen in a new way, with
a new, strange anxiety. Martin's fading face seemed to have taught her
about Ellen, about some preparation for the wedding which might have
been left out, in spite of all the care and order of the burnished
house. Did she really love Arthur Alce?--Did she really know what she
was doing--what love meant?

Joann