“Wait till he sees me!” cried Nettie, rolling up her blue eyes, with pretended egotism, and just then Fair came down the garden path toward them, lovely in a soft white dress and garden hat, with a warm color on her round cheeks and a bright light streaming from her splendid eyes. She had just parted from her lover, and the love light on her face was dazzling.
“Whew! your eyes are so bright, Miss Howard, it is like looking at the sun!” Augustus Frayne exclaimed, pretending to shield his gray orbs with his hands. She made him a merry bow of acknowledgment, then sat down by Nettie on the broad garden seat.
“What were you all laughing about?” she inquired, putting her arm around Nettie’s waist.
“It is those silly girls going out of their senses because Prince Gonzaga is coming to your wedding to-morrow,” returned the young man.
“Yes, Fair, only think, you’re going to have the honor of the prince’s company at your wedding,” cried Clara vivaciously; and the beautiful bride-elect thought wonderingly:
“This is like a story from the ‘Arabian Nights.’ Only two years ago I was a poor working girl in New York, miserable and starving, and now I am to be the bride of the man I worship; I am surrounded by wealth and splendor, I have trunks full of magnificent clothing, I have caskets of rare jewels, and the proudest people in this city will assemble to do honor to my marriage. Yes, even a prince will be looking on while I give my hand to my beloved until death.”
Suddenly there came to her a memory of that other dark wedding day, and of her humble friend, Sadie Allen, and she sighed to herself:
“Dear Sadie, if it were possible, I would rather have you here than the prince.”
The Italian prince did not care for festivities, as he had told Augustus Frayne, but he had made up his mind to attend the wedding at the villa, not because it was his ancestral home so much as because the name Fairfax Howard on the wedding cards had excited in his mind a languid interest.
“I knew a Fairfax once,” he said to Miss Beatrix Consani, with whom he was on friendly terms. “If this Miss Howard is half as lovely as the Fairfax I knew, the bridegroom is a lucky dog.”