"Yes," answered Eugenia, smiling up at him. "The legend is right. We must enter Paradise to find the diamond leaf. But I was right, too. It is my prince who will bring mine to me."
CHAPTER XII.
THE WEDDING
Lunch was served on the porch, for the tables for the wedding supper were already spread in the dining-room, and Alec had locked the doors that nothing might disturb its perfect order.
"I think we are really going to be able to avoid that last wild rush which usually accompanies home weddings," said Mrs. Sherman, as they sat leisurely talking over the dessert. "Usually the bridesmaids' gloves are missing, or the bride's slippers have been packed into one of the trunks and sent on ahead to the depot. But this time I have tried to have everything so perfectly arranged that the wedding will come to pass as quietly and naturally as a flower opens. I want to have everything give the impression of having bloomed into place."
"Eliot and Mom Beck are certainly doing their part to make such an impression," said Eugenia. "Eliot has already counted over every article I am to wear, a dozen times, and they're all laid out in readiness, even to the 'something blue.'"
"Oh, that reminds me!" began Lloyd, then stopped abruptly. Nobody noticed the exclamation, however, but Mary, and, with swift intuition, she guessed what the something blue had suggested to the maid of honor. It was that bit of turquoise that caused the only scramble in the preparations, for Lloyd could not remember where she had put it.
"I was suah I dropped it into one of the boxes in my top bureau drawer," she said to herself on the way up-stairs. Then, with her finger on her lip, she stopped on the threshold of the sewing-room to consider. She remembered that when she gave up her room to the guests, all the boxes had been taken out of that drawer. Some of them had been put in the sewing-room closet, and some carried to a room at the end of the back hall, where trunks and hampers were stored.
Now, while Betty was down-stairs, helping with a few last details, Lloyd took advantage of her absence to search all the boxes in the closet and drawers of the sewing-room, but the missing turquoise was not in any of them.