A Modern Chronicle -- Volume 03

al as the moss-hung Southern forest into which she stared. She was happy, as a child is happy who is taken on an excursion into

her life had she sat watching a shaft of sunlight strike across the stone pillars of its gothic arches! She saw, in the chancel, tall and grave and pale, Peter Erwin standing beside the man with the flus

he holy state of Matrimony? Wilt thou obey him, and serve him, love, honour, and keep him in sickne

ng the great rose window with its blended colours, and the vaul

in his buttonhole. He was the representative of the future she had deliberately chosen. And yet, by virtue of the strange ceremony through which they had passed, he seemed to have changed. In her attempt to seize upon a reality she looked out of the window. They were just passing t

e tall pear trees, gave it an unrecognizable, gala air. Long had it stood there, patient, unpretentious, content that the great things should pass it by! And now, modest still, it had been singled out from amongst

journey in the "little house under the hill." There, locked up in the little desk Cousin Eleanor had given her long ago, was the unfinished manuscript of that novel written at fever heat during those summer days in which she had sought to escape from a humdrum existence. And now-she had escaped. Aunt Mary, helpful

d; "I'll be coming back often to see y

t always was a fine lady ye were, with such a family and such a bringin' up. And now ye've married

reprovingly, "what ideas yo

t lady she was, and she a wee bit of a thing. And wasn't

e clung to him. And Peter, who had the carriage ready. What would her wedding have been without Peter? As they drove towards the station, hi

hocked her, irresistibly presented itself: was it not Pr

-by on her way through New York from Silverdale, Honora had constructed him: he was perpetual yet sophisticated Youth; he was Finance and Fashion; he was Power in correctly cut clothes. And when he had arrived in St. Louis to play his part in the wedding festivities,

tations as a bride were partly responsible. No matter how much a young girl may have trifled with that electric force in the male sex known as the grand passion, she shrinks from surrendering herself to its dominion. Honora shrank. He made love to h

check suit had the magic touch of the metropolis. His manner matched his garments. Obsequious porters grasped his pig-skin bag, and seized Honora's; the man at the gate inclined his head as he examined their tickets, and the Pullman conductor h

e conductor, as he went out, so

nce, not gracefully, and he became once more that superflu

starts," suggested Honora, desperately. "Oh, Howard,

er out of place. Was he, after all, an utterly different man than what she had thought him?

," he whispered, "all the red tape is over, and I've go

red, still struggling, her

the matter?

, please let me go. It's-it's so

feebled. She broke from him, and opened the door, and reached the cement platform and the cold air. When he joined her, there was something jokingly a

. "They're the most erra

y the feminine brain adjusts itself to new conditions. I

ough the quaint streets of New Orleans, that most foreign of American cities, searching out the tumbledown French houses; and Honora was never tired of imagining the romances and tragedies which must have taken place in them. The new scenes excited her,-the quaint cafes with their delic

ly proud of his wife, and although he did justice to the cooking, he cared but little for the mysterious courtyards, the Spanish buildings, and the novels of Mr. George W. Cable, which Honora devoured when she was too tired to walk about. He followed her obediently to the battle field of New Orleans, and admired as obediently

only for brief periods. He even felt

for those horrid stocks

just a n

were alone in their sit

have to do my hair all over again. I've got such

declared meaningly,

ture was in reality his wife! Nor did the feeling grow less intense with time, being quite the same when they arrived at a fashionable resort in

ss vast, unexplored valleys to other distant, blue-stained ridges that rose between them and the sunset. Honora took an infinite delight in the ramshackle cabins beside the red-clay roads, in the historic atmosphere of the ancient houses and porticoes of the Warm Springs, where the fathers of the Republic had come to take

l filled, and people interested Honora as well as scenery-a proof of her huma

pect me to be-n

ked stocks while waiting for Honora to complete her toilets; and he gathered from two of these, who were married, that patience was a necess

He paused to light a cigarette, and smiled at her significantly. "If you can dolly the ladies along once

grew

" she ex

somewhat s

g. Don't take it seriously. But it

te," she answered

a lay awake for a long time that night, and the poignant and ever recurring remembrance of her husband's remark sent the blood t

x with the others in the hotel. She had thought it strange that Howard did not know them, but for a reason which she did not analyze she hesitated to ask him who they were. They had rather a rude manner of staring -especially the men-and the air of deriving infinite amusement from that which went on about them. One of them, a young man with a lisp who was

sweet bride. It was Mrs. Tyler's ambition to become thin (which was hitching her wagon to a star with a vengeance), and she invited our heroine to share her constitutional on the porch. Honor

hat they were laughing at her. She tried in vain to drive them from her mind, to listen to Mrs. Tyler's account of how she, too, came as a bride to New York from some place with a classical name, and to the advice that accompanied the narration. The most conspicuous

and unexpectedly in the midst of a descripti

asked

nd, sitting on the rail. She's

ich she could not control

Mrs. Tyler. And she seems to have so

horribly fast set with which no self-respecting woman would be seen. It's an outrage that they should come to a hotel like this and a

least, required some imagination on Mrs. Mait

ho is always acting in that silly way, they call Toots Cuthbert. He gets his name in the newspapers by leading cotillons in New York and N

Sutcliffe with his

hat Mrs. Tyler's mann

cliffe? What a wonderful school it is! I ful

used herself instead, and hurried back towards her room. On the way

point of view of our honeymoon. Sid Dallam is swamped with busines

onishment

don't like this place nearly so well as N

ved, and patted

night, old gi