spread in a fan against the pillow and her body curled up cozily. The
remaining hours of the night, in a kind of waking faint she could never
find the words to describe, Mrs. Samstag, with that dreadful dew of her
sweat constantly out over her, lay with her twisted lips to the faint
perfume of that fan of Alma's flowing hair, her toes curling in and out.
Out and in. Toward morning she slept. Actually, sweetly, and deeply, as
if she could never have done with deep draughts of it.

She awoke to the brief patch of sunlight that smiled into their
apartment for about eight minutes of each forenoon.

Alma was at the pretty chore of lifting the trays from a hamper of
roses. She placed a shower of them on her mother's coverlet with a kiss,
a deeper and dearer one, somehow, this morning.

There was a card, and Mrs. Samstag read it and laughed:

Good morning, Carrie.
Louis.

They seemed to her, poor dear, these roses, to be pink with the glory of
the coming of the dawn.

* * * * *

On the spur of the moment and because the same precipitate decision that
determined Louis Latz's successes in Wall Street determined him here,
they were married the following Thursday in Lakewood, New Jersey,
without even allowing Carrie time for the blue-twill traveling suit. She
wore her brown-velvet, instead, looking quite modish, a sable wrap, gift