VII AFRAID
I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June. Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so different as we are alike.
On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed—the carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the room—the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following. Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy had told me, she herself was one of Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.
Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap peremptory, confident.
"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door. Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore the mystery and authority of the hour.
"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."
"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again—a real, weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."
Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.
"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I should think you might—"
But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,—as if there were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not sufficiently simple to know it for herself.