were delighted at the
happy arrangement that had been made. She glanced contentedly toward the
child-bride.

It was a revelation to the whole village that Marcia had grown up and was
so handsome.

Dismay filled the breasts of the village gossips. They had been defrauded.
Here was a fine scandal which they had failed to discover in time and
spread abroad in its due course.

Everybody was shy of speaking to the bride. She sat in her lovely finery
like some wild rose caught as a sacrifice. Yet every one admitted that she
might have done far worse. David was a good man, with prospects far beyond
most young men of his time. Moreover he was known to have a brilliant
mind, and the career he had chosen, that of journalism, in which he was
already making his mark, was one that promised to be lucrative as well as
influential.

It was all very hurried at the last. Madam Schuyler and Dolly the maid
helped her off with the satin and lace finery, and she was soon out of her
bridal attire and struggling with the intricacies of Kate's travelling
costume.

Marcia was not Marcia any longer, but Mrs. David Spafford. She had been
made to feel the new name almost at once, and it gave her a sense of
masquerading pleasant enough for the time being, but with a dim foreboding
of nameless dread and emptiness for the future, like all masquerading
which must end sometime. And when the mask is taken off how sad if one is
not to find one's real self again: or worse still if one may never remove
the mask, but must grow to it and be it from the soul.

All this Marcia felt but dimly of course, for she was young and light
hearted naturally, and the excitement and pretty things about her could
not but be pleasant.

To have Kate's friends stand about her, half shyly trying to joke with her
as they might have done with Kate, to feel their admiring glances, and
half envious references to her handsome husband, almost intoxicated her
for the moment. Her cheeks grew rosier as she tied on Kate's pretty poke
bonnet whose nodding blue flowers had been brought over from Paris by a
friend of Kate's. It seemed a shame that Kate should not have her things
after all. The pleasure died out of Marcia's eyes as she carefully looped
the soft blue ribbons under her round chin and drew on Kate's long gloves.
There was no denying the fact that Kate's outfit was becoming to Marcia,
for she had that complexion that looks well with any color under the sun,
though in bl