For a moment the husband caught a glimpse of a pair of swimming gray eyes with a world of woe reflected in their shadowy depths; the next a trembling pliant figure was nestling in his arms, and trying to explain amid tearful sobs about the bad luck coming to them both through the removal of the wedding-ring.
As soon as the astonished husband could frame an intelligible meaning out of the story, told with many interruptions of sobs and kisses and passionate hugs, he burst into a merry laugh.
“Why, you little silly!” he began, but his voice melted to a tenderness inarticulate in words, although mutually intelligible in love’s rich vocabulary.
“Dear, dear, dear! to think what a sweet little goose it is after all,” commenced the husband, after love’s exactions had been religiously complied with. “Why, I know ladies who are continually losing their wedding-rings. There is Mrs. North for instance——”
“O, George!!”
“Well,” resumed the husband a little confusedly, “I know, of course, that she and her husband do not get on very well together, but there are others. There is—let me see—but never mind—I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I will take the ring off your finger myself and put it on again, then that will make everything just as it was,” and with this pleasing little sophistry both bride and groom were made happy once more.
As the youthful pair left the arbor, the old lady, whose loving heart was wont to grow young again as she contemplated the happiness of the others, softly rubbed the mists from her glasses as she said with a sigh, “O, I wish Alice had not taken off her wedding-ring!”
CHAPTER II.
THAT the shadows of anxiety had not been altogether dispelled from the breast of the young bride, Alice Montgomery, was rendered apparent to her grandmamma the following morning, when the exactions of business had emptied the house of its male population.
The two ladies were seated on a broad piazza, whose columns and roof were richly festooned with a wealth of luxuriant creeper which the gentle breeze, creeping up from the meadows and laden with the smell of the hay-field, just stirred and no more.