. The sun rose
brightly and made weird gleaming of the silver wire on which the dying
roses hung. The air was heavy with their breath, and the rooms in the
early garish light looked out of place as if some fairy wand had failed
to break the incantation at the right hour and left a piece of Magicland
behind. The parlor maid went about uncertainly, scarcely knowing what to
do and what to leave undone, and the milk cars, and newsboys, and early
laborers began to make a clatter of every day on the streets. The
morning paper, flung across the steps with Betty's picture, where
Betty's reluctant feet had gone a few hours before, seemed to mock at
life, and upstairs the man that Betty thought she went out to marry, lay
in a heavy stupor of sleep. Happy Betty, to be resting beneath the
coarse sheet of the kindly working girl, sleeping the sleep of
exhaustion and youth in safety, two miles from the rose-bowered rooms!

Long before day had really started in the great city Jane Carson was up
and at work. She dressed swiftly and silently, then went to her little
trunk, and from it selected a simple wardrobe of coarse clean garments.
One needed mending and two buttons were off. She sat by the dingy window
and strained her eyes in the dawn to make the necessary repairs. She
hesitated long over the pasteboard suit-box that she drew from under the
bed. It contained a new dark blue serge dress for which she had saved a
long time and in which she had intended to appear at church next
Sabbath. She was divided between her desire to robe the exquisite little
guest in its pristine folds and her longing to wear it herself. There
was a sense of justice also which entered into the matter. If that
elegant wedding dress was to be hers, and all those wonderful silk
underclothes, which very likely she would never allow herself to wear,
for they would be out of place on a poor working girl, it was not fair
to repay their donor in old clothes. She decided to give the runaway
bride her new blue serge. With just a regretful bit of a sigh she laid
it out on the foot of the bed, and carefully spread out the tissue
papers and folded the white satin garments away out of sight, finishing
the bundle with a thick wrapping of old newspapers from a pile behind
the door and tying it securely. She added a few pins to make the matter
more sure, and got out a stub of a pencil and labeled it in large
letters, "My summer dresses," then shoved it far back under the bed.