No girl-friend was there. Only Emma Snow and Dr. Ray stood beside her, and, except the clergyman, no one else was there. There was no music. But for the ruby-red bud in Sên King-lo’s lounge coat, there was not a flower, unless the red peppers he himself had bought at dawn at the market—and that Ivy wore in the little gray frock that Elenore Ray had given her—counted for flowers.
There were more old clothes than new in Ivy Gilbert’s trousseau, and those that were new were Dr. Ray’s gift.
From Emma the girl would take nothing, for Emma too had been a penniless bride, and Ivy would accept nothing for which Charles Snow’s money had paid. Lady Snow was greatly hurt, but she understood and forgave.
It sounds a sad wedding and a drear one. But the man and the girl that stood at the altar were radiant-eyed. Neither had a doubt now.
They said goodbye in the vestry—the two women holding Sên King-lo’s wife in their arms lingeringly—and she and he breakfasted alone in his rooms, to be dismantled now. Then Mr. and Mrs. Sên caught the next train for New York.
They dined alone. Ivy still wore her peppers dangling in a gown they matched, a red dress which—he had told her so now—he had thought like the wedding-dress of a Chinese bride, the night she had given him her confession-book.
Three days later they sailed for Liverpool. Mrs. Sên was glad to go; she was going home, and New York had not been entirely comfortable. Washington necessarily is cosmopolitan and race-seasoned. No one had looked at her askance when she had walked its streets beside a Chinese friend or lingered with him in the Corcoran Gallery—unless the darkies who met them did. New York was different. Ivy thought that the man who served their meals was curious, and she had a tingling sense that the shop-discipline deferential courtesy of the clerk at Tiffany’s was all for Sên’s purse—less than none of it for their companionship. She thought that several passersby on Fifth Avenue looked at them odiously; twice she saw a lip curl, and once a woman laughed.
She did not regret Washington. But she was glad to leave New York.
The voyage was smooth, and her cabin was sweet with lilies that kept their waxen freshness and their intoxicating perfume well past-midocean.