The sanction of St. Simeon's was upon the bride, crowned with the veil and orange blossoms of her solemn dedication, or so the bridesmaid had understood it.
"Behold, whiles she before the altar stands,
Hearing the holy priest that to her speakes,
And blesseth her with his two happy hands!"
Such in substance was the bridesmaid's understanding of it, if not in just these words.
To be sure the occasion held its disappointment. The concentration of gifts upon the bride would argue that others shared with Emmy Lou a sense of the inadequacy of the bridegroom in his inglorious black clothes.
There was a steel engraving above the mantel in the dining-room called "The Cavalier's Wedding," at which Emmy Lou glanced again today as she came in, and in which the bridegroom has a hat in his hand with a feather which sweeps the ground, and wears a worthy lace-trimmed coat.
At the dinner-table she repeated the news which had so dismayed and astounded her.
"There's a little girl in my class named Charlotte Wright whose papa and mamma don't live together."
"Dear, dear!" expostulated Aunt Cordelia, "I don't like you to be hearing such things."
This would seem to ratify Hattie's position. "Then I mustn't play with her?"
"Why, Emmy Lou, what a thing for you to say!"