"Good gracious, no!" Cousin Ethel was horrified. "Don't you know it's unlucky? She isn't going to put it on again till she goes to the church. You'll see it then. And she looks lovely. It's the prettiest wedding-dress I've ever seen."
Lily thought of the misty whiteness of her wedding-dress, swathed in tissue paper, hanging alone in a large closet, with a dust-sheet spread upon the floor beneath it, across which lay the heavy gleaming folds of the embroidered train.
She could not believe that she was to wear it. On the eve of her wedding, the preparations all somehow miraculously completed, Lily was principally conscious of overpowering physical fatigue.
The wistfulness of an utterly over-wrought spirit possessed her, and she felt strangely inclined to tears.
"It will be a very sad house without you, little Lily," said her father pathetically.
"Oh, I hope not, Father."
"Well, well—I mustn't let my loneliness sadden your joy. You are happy, my darling?"
"Very," said Lily in a choked voice.
"Remember that if you have the slightest doubt of your own feelings, it's not too late to say so. Even now, at the eleventh hour," said Philip solemnly. "It's not too late."
It was the first time that he had made any suggestion of the sort, and Lily was by this time quite incapable of viewing it as a practical possibility. The beautiful and costly wedding-dress hanging in the closet upstairs, the lace veil and the pearl necklace, the packed and corded trunks with new-painted initials, the very fact that within less than twenty-four hours a number of guests would be assembling in church, made it quite impossible to receive Philip's portentous warning as being more than a mere form of words.