of the groom, lending genuine magnificence.

Alma was there, of course, in a beautiful fox scarf, also gift of the
groom, and locked in a pale kind of tensity that made her seem more
than ever like a little white flower to Leo Friedlander, the sole other
attendant, and who during the ceremony yearned at her with his gaze. But
her eyes were squeezed tight against his, as if to forbid herself the
consciousness that life seemed suddenly so richly sweet to her--oh, so
richly sweet!

* * * * *

There was a time during the first months of the married life of Louis
and Carrie Latz when it seemed to Alma, who in the sanctity of her
lovely little ivory bedroom all appointed in rose enamel toilet trifles,
could be prayerful with the peace of it, that the old Carrie, who could
come pale and terrible out of her drugged nights, belonged to some
grimacing and chimeric past. A dead past that had buried its dead and
its hatchet.

There had been a month at a Hot Springs in the wintergreen heart of
Virginia, and whatever Louis may have felt in his heart of his right to
the privacy of these honeymoon days was carefully belied on his lips,
and at Alma's depriving him now and then of his wife's company, packing
her off to rest when he wanted a climb with her up a mountain slope or a
drive over piny roads, he could still smile and pinch her cheek.

"You're stingy to me with my wife, Alma," he said to her upon one of
these provocations. "I don't believe she's got a daughter at all, but a
little policeman instead."