the Country Club last night. They
all drank more than they should. Somebody called father up to-day and
said that Palmer had emptied a bottle of wine into the piano. He hasn't
been here to-day."

"He'll be along. And as for the other--perhaps it wasn't Palmer who did
it."

"That's not it, Sidney. I'm frightened."

Three months before, perhaps, Sidney could not have comforted her; but
three months had made a change in Sidney. The complacent sophistries
of her girlhood no longer answered for truth. She put her arms around
Christine's shoulders.

"A man who drinks is a broken reed," said Christine. "That's what I'm
going to marry and lean on the rest of my life--a broken reed. And that
isn't all!"

She got up quickly, and, trailing her long satin train across the floor,
bolted the door. Then from inside her corsage she brought out and held
to Sidney a letter. "Special delivery. Read it."

It was very short; Sidney read it at a glance:--

Ask your future husband if he knows a girl at 213 ---- Avenue.

Three months before, the Avenue would have meant nothing to Sidney. Now
she knew. Christine, more sophisticated, had always known.

"You see," she said. "That's what I'm up against."

Quite suddenly Sidney knew who the girl at 213 ---- Avenue was. The
paper she held in her hand was hospital paper with the heading torn off.
The whole sordid story lay before her: Grace Irving, with her thin face
and cropped hair, and the newspaper on the floor of the ward beside her!

One of the bridesmaids thumped violently on the door outside.

"Another electric lamp," she called excitedly through the door. "And
Palmer is downstairs."

"You see," Christine said drearily. "I have received another electric
lamp, and Palmer is downstairs! I've got to go through with it, I
suppose. The only difference between me and other brides is that I know
what I'm getting. Most of them do not."

"You're going on with it?"

"It's too late to do anything else. I am not going to give this
neighborhood anything to talk about."

She picked up her veil and set the coronet on her head. Sidney stood
with the letter in her hands. One of K.'s answers to her hot question
had been this:--

"There is no sense in looking back unless it helps us to look ahead.
What your little girl of the ward has been is not so important as what
she is going to be."

"Even granting this to be true," she said to Christine slowly,--"and it
may only be malicious after