In the grand parlor of Mrs. Dalrymple’s home the dead girl lay like one asleep, in a white casket banked with rarest flowers whose delicate perfume pervaded the whole house. In yesterday’s newspapers a brief announcement had been made:
“Died.—Suddenly, at her mother’s residence, No. 1512A Fifth Avenue, Tuesday evening, Darling, only daughter of Mrs. Verna Dalrymple.
“Friends and relatives of the family are respectfully invited to attend the funeral services from the family residence, Thursday noon. Interment at Greenwood.”
In other columns of the newspaper longer paragraphs were given to the grand noon wedding of the young millionaire, Frank Laurier, to the brilliant society belle and heiress, Miss Cora Ellyson. It would be a grand church wedding and the floral decorations were superb, while the trousseau, lately arrived from Paris, was simply magnificent. Pictures of the prospective bride and groom, intertwined with true-lovers’ knots, were duly printed for the benefit of an admiring public.
As the hour of noon drew near, Mrs. Dalrymple’s house was filled with sympathetic guests, to whose ears had floated rumors of the sad ending of her long grief for her stolen child—recovered only in death. When they saw Darling Dalrymple in her coffin—her mother had never given her any name but Darling—they wept in sympathy with the bereaved heart from whom this lovely treasure had been so cruelly wrested by the grim King of Terrors.
The beautiful Episcopal service was read, the mother’s farewell kiss pressed on the cold, white brow, the casket closed, and borne out to the white-plumed hearse, the carriages were filled with the mother and friends, and the solemn cortège moved away to Greenwood, where the grim family vault had been opened to receive another scion of the old house of Van Dorn, the fairest of all its fair daughters.
At the same time only a block away, on the same avenue, a bridal train was leaving the Van Dorn mansion for the church.
Life and death jostling each other almost side by side!
In one carriage sat the bride, with her cousins, the Van Dorns, and her dark, brilliant beauty was at its best, enhanced by the snowy bridal robes and the joy that flashed from her eyes at the thought that she would soon be the bride of the man she adored.
Laurier and his best man were to meet them at the church, the bridegroom having recovered sufficiently from his sprain that he could walk without a crutch.