Stranger Within the Gates
The Best Man
Spice Box
By Way of the Silverthorns
The Seventh Hour
Dawn of the Morning
The Search
Brentwood
Cloudy Jewel
The Voice in the Wilderness

* * * * *

EXIT BETTY

BY

GRACE LIVINGSTON HILL

Author of
Marcia Schuyler, The Search, Dawn of the Morning, Etc.

Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers New York

Made in the United States of America

Copyright, 1919, by The Christian Herald

Copyright, 1920, by J. B. Lippincott Company

EXIT BETTY

CHAPTER I

THE crowd gave way and the car glided smoothly up to the curb at the
canopied entrance to the church. The blackness of the wet November night
was upon the street. It had rained at intervals all day.

The pavements shone wetly like new paint in the glimmer of the street
lights, and rude shadows gloomed in every cranny of the great stone
building.

Betty, alone in the midst of her bridal finery, shrank back from the
gaze of the curious onlookers, seeming very small like a thing of the
air caught in a mesh of the earth.

She had longed all day for this brief respite from everyone, but it had
passed before she could concentrate her thoughts. She started forward, a
flame of rose for an instant in her white cheeks, but gone as quickly.
Her eyes reminded one of the stars among the far-away clouds on a night
of fitful storm with only glimpses of their beauty in breaks of the
overcast sky. Her small hands gripped one another excitedly, and the
sweet lips were quivering.

A white-gloved hand reached out to open the car door, and other hands
caught and cared for the billow of satin and costly lace with which she
was surrounded, as if it, and not she, were the important one.

They led her up the curtained way, where envious eyes peeped through a
furtive rip in the canvas, or craned around an opening to catch a better
glimpse of her loveliness, one little dark-eyed foreigner even reached
out a grimy, wondering finger to the silver whiteness of her train; but
she, all unknowing, trod the carpeted path as in a dream.

The wedding march was just beginning. She caught the distant notes, felt
the hush as she approached the audience, and wondered why the ordeal
seemed so much greater now that she was actually come to the moment. If
she had known it would be like this--! Oh, why had sh