like a double
white flower herself.

As for Jerome, he felt awkwardly self-conscious in his new clothes,
but bore himself so proudly as to conceal it. It requires genuine
valor to overcome new clothes, when one seldom has them. They become,
under such circumstances, more than clothes--they are at least
skin-deep. However, Jerome had that valor. He had bought a suit of
fine blue cloth, and a vest of flowered white satin like a
bridegroom's. He wore his best shirt with delicate cambric ruffles on
bosom and wristbands, and his throat was swathed in folds of sheerest
lawn, which he kept his chin clear of, with a splendid and stately
lift. Jerome's hair, which was darker than when he was a boy, was
brushed carefully into a thick crest over his white forehead, which
had, like a child's, a bold and innocent fulness of curve at the
temples. He had not usually much color, but that night his cheeks
were glowing, and his black eyes, commonly somewhat stern from excess
of earnestness, were brilliant with the joy of youth.

Mrs. Edwards looked at one, then the other, with the delighted
surprise of a mother bird who sees her offspring in their first
gayety of full plumage. She picked a thread from Jerome's coat, she
put back a stray lock of Elmira's hair, she bade them turn this way
and that.

When they had started she hitched her chair close to the window,
pressed her forehead against the glass, looked out, and watched the
white flutter of Elmira's skirts until they disappeared in the dark
folds of the night.

There was, that night, a soft commotion of air rather than any
distinct current of wind, like a gentle heaving and subsidence of
veiled breasts of nature. The tree branches spread and gloomed with
deeper shadows; mysterious white things with indeterminate motions
were seen aloof across meadows or in door-yards, and might have been
white-clad women, or flowering bushes, or ghosts.

Jerome and Elmira, when one of these pale visions seemed floating
from some shadowy gateway ahead, wondered to each other if this or
that girl were just starting for the party, but when they drew near
the whiteness stirred at the gate still, and was only a bush of
bridal-wreath. Jerome and Elmira were really the last on the road to
the party; Upham people went early to festivities.

"It is very late," Elmira said, nervously; she held up her white
skirts, ruffling softly to the wind, with both hands, lest they trail
the dewy grass, and flew a