ack to
the Archbishop--" he said reflectively, "that the trouble with that man
was that he was too high-church. Now my leanings have never been
toward high-churchness. Ordinarily my inclinations toward church at
all are discernible with difficulty. My enthusiasm regarding it is
continually, under normal conditions, at low ebb. And this, I take it,
makes me a low-churchman."

"It's a most encouraging sign, to see you embracing any kind of
ritual," said Miss Maitland. "Isabel, I have hopes of him yet."

"That is very good of you," replied the bride, smiling amiably at her
lord and master--to speak academically.

"Very strange feeling it gives one to be so suddenly married in this
way--without any of the conventional preliminaries," Wilkinson
continued. "I always imagined that when my time was come, while the
grape scissors and sets of Jane Austen and cut glass berry bowls were
pouring in on my happy fiancee, I should have one last, lonely,
sentimental hour set apart for maiden meditations and twilight
reflections over my dead life and half-forgotten past. Also to recover
from the effects of my ushers' dinner. An ushers'--girls, have either
of you ever given or even attended an ushers' dinner?"

His companions' reply was a laughing negative.

"Well," said the young man, gravely, "to have escaped giving an ushers'
dinner is assuredly worth an almost innumerable number of pairs of
grape scissors and several entire editions of Jane Austen. Yes, I am
certainly to be congratulated, for an ushers' dinner should be shunned
like the Bubonic plague. To begin with, the cost is simply colossal.
The food, of course, counts for practically nothing, and the drink is
only an incidental, though a large one. But repairing the broken
furniture, and repapering and redecorating the room in which the
function has been held, and purchasing another piano in place of the
one which your guests have playfully torn to pieces--those are a few of
the things that count."

"They sound as though they did," agreed Miss Maitland.

"Moreover," Wilkinson continued, "if the dinner is given at the club to
which you belong, you always put the board of governors in an awkward
position, for at their next meeting after your entertainment they can
never agree on whether to expel you outright or merely suspend you for
three years, and quite often there is bad feeling created by these
dissensions; while if you hold the affair at a public restaurant