three hundred and seventy-one gifts were arranged in two big rooms
at the hotel, duly ticketed, and the three hundred and seventy-one
dreadful personal notes of thanks had been somehow scribbled off
and dispatched. Leila was absolutely exhausted, and felt as pale
and pasty as she looked. People were all so stupid and tiresome
and inconsiderate, she said wearily to herself, and the awful
breakfast would be so long and dull, with everybody saying the
same thing to her, and Parker trying to be funny and simply making
himself ridiculous! The barbarity of the modern wedding impressed
itself vaguely upon the bride as she laughed and talked in a
strained and mechanical manner, and whatever they said to her and
to her parents, the guests were afterward unanimous in deciding
that poor Leila had been an absolute fright.

But Mrs. Gregory, in her dark blue suit and her new sables, won
everybody's eyes as she came down the church aisle with her
husband beside her. Her son was not quite a month old, and if she
had not recovered her usual wholesome bloom, there was a refined,
almost a spiritual, element in her beauty now that more than made
up for the loss. She wore a fragrant great bunch of violets at her
breast, and under the sweeping brim of her hat her beautiful eyes
were as deeply blue as the flowers. She seemed full of a new
wifely and matronly charm to-day, and it was quite in key with the
pose that old Mrs. Gregory and young Charles should be constantly
in her neighborhood. Her relatives with her, her babies safe at
home, young Mrs. Gregory was the personification of domestic
dignity and decorum.

At the hotel, after the wedding, she was the centre of an admiring
group, and conscious of her husband's approving eyes, full of her