"A feast ... not really?" she stammered.
A slight cloud passed over Danilo's face. "There! She does not approve, my brother.... I was afraid of that."
"I was surprised," she said, gravely. "And then you are not to be with us."
Danilo smiled. "When I am well again.... You see, one cannot have too many excuses for a feast." He gave Stillman his hand. "My brother, what should we do without you?"
The Ithaca was crowded. The long tables had been set, and the usual decorations, fern fronds and carnations, made splashes of green and red color upon the table-cloths. Lycurgus came forward, bowing in his old manner.
"Ah, that Mr. Stillman," he whispered to Claire, "he is a man, I can tell you! Thank you! thank you!... He says nothing about prices. Only a feast ... the best to be had! And everybody invited.... I have worked myself all day in the kitchen.... You shall see!... And you are a beautiful bride! Never have I seen one more beautiful!... That Danilo is a lucky man ... and you have made him happy. Let us pray God everything goes right."
A feeling of chill had succeeded Claire's poignant emotion, but now she felt warmed—everything was so simple, so natural, so lacking in all pretense. Lycurgus led Claire to the bride's seat, Stillman followed with Nellie Holmes and Miss Proll. A little ripple of applause ran up and down the tables, but the company was still a little uncertain of what was most fitting to do. A wedding-feast without the groom was hard to sense. But presently mastica was served and the first toast drunk.... After that, constraint was banished.
Now for the first time it came upon Claire that she was at her own wedding-feast, and that Stillman was sitting beside her. It was almost as if he had yielded her up to some austere duty, as if the feast that had been spread for him was one not so much of joy as of renunciation—a last supper in the upper chamber of his heart's desire. Before her lay Stillman's tribute—a wonderful golden basket of white roses. She had never seen roses so white. What a touching thing this feast was, after all! What a long distance Stillman had traveled in order to appreciate the significance of such a childlike thing, of sensing just what it meant to Danilo! And suddenly she felt how beautiful and how tragic life was, how cleansed and scarred by the windstorms of emotion! Life was like a landscape answering sunshine and cloud in its season, always beautiful, always incomplete, veiled sometimes in the mists of morning and again palpitant and fully revealed in the noonday sun, unchanging and yet never quite the same....
In the midst of the feast champagne was served, and the guests began to move from table to table with their glasses lifted high and their lips smiling out good will. The men stopped shyly opposite Claire's seat and for the most part toasted her silently, but here and there a patron who had danced to the old tunes that she had once played clasped her by the hand and called gaily to her. Finally a young woman came forward.