er's voice, and then her step upon the stair. She
heard the sound of Harry Cresswell's buggy, and a scurrying at the front
door. On came the dressmaker's footsteps--then her door was
unceremoniously burst open.

Helen Cresswell stood there radiant; the dressmaker, too, was wreathed
in smiles. She carried a big red-sealed bundle.

"Zora!" cried Helen in ecstasy. "It's come!" Zora regarded her coldly,
and stood at bay. The dressmaker was ripping and snipping, and soon
there lay revealed before them--the Paris gown!

Helen was in raptures, but her conscience pricked her. She appealed to
them. "Ought I to tell? You see, Mary's gown will look miserably common
beside it."

The dressmaker was voluble. There was really nothing to tell; and
besides, Helen was a Cresswell and it was to be expected, and so forth.
Helen pursed her lips and petulantly tapped the floor with her foot.

"But the other gown?"

"Where is it?" asked the dressmaker, looking about. "It would make a
pretty morning-dress--"

But Helen had taken a sudden dislike to the thought of it.

"I don't want it," she declared. "And besides, I haven't room for it in
my trunks."

Of a sudden she leaned down and whispered to Zora: "Zora, hide it and
keep it if you want it. Come," to the dressmaker, "I'm dying to try this
on--now.... Remember, Zora--not a word." And all this to Zora seemed no
surprise; it was the Way, and it was opening before her because the
talisman lay in her trunk.

So at last it came to Easter morning. The world was golden with jasmine,
and crimson with azalea; down in the darker places gleamed the misty
glory of the dogwood; new cotton shook, glimmered, and blossomed in the
black fields, and over all the soft Southern sun poured its awakening
light of life. There was happiness and hope again in the cabins, and
hope and--if not happiness, ambition, in the mansions.

Zora, almost forgetting the wedding, stood before the mirror. Laying
aside her dress, she draped her shimmering cloth about her, dragging her
hair down in a heavy mass over ears and neck until she seemed herself a
bride. And as she stood there, awed with the mystical union of a dead
love and a living new born self, there came drifting in at the window,
faintly, the soft sound of far-off marriage music.

"'Tis thy marriage morning, shining in the sun!"

Two white and white-swathed brides were coming slowly down the great
staircase of Cresswell Oaks, and two white and black-cl