inspected her own daughter’s twelve-dozen-of-everything. There had been nothing to quicken the pulse in young Delia’s placid bridal; but as Tina’s wedding day ap{168}proached imagination burgeoned like the year. The wedding was to be celebrated at Lovell Place, the old house on the Sound where Delia Lovell had herself been married, and where, since her mother’s death, she spent her summers. Although the neighbourhood was already overspread with a net-work of mean streets, the old house, with its thin colonnaded verandah, still looked across an uncurtailed lawn and leafy shrubberies to the narrows of Hell Gate; and the drawing-rooms kept their frail slender settees, their Sheraton consoles and cabinets. It had been thought useless to discard them for more fashionable furniture, since the growth of the city made it certain that the place must eventually be sold.
{168}
Tina, like Mrs. Ralston, was to have a “house-wedding,” though Episcopalian society was beginning to disapprove of{169} such ceremonies, which were regarded as the despised pis-aller of Baptists, Methodists, Unitarians and the other altarless sects. In Tina’s case, however, both Delia and Charlotte felt that the greater privacy of a marriage in the house made up for its more secular character; and the Halseys favoured their decision. The ladies accordingly settled themselves at Lovell Place before the end of June, and every morning young Lanning Halsey’s catboat was seen beating across the bay, and furling its sail at the anchorage below the lawn.
{169}
There had never been a fairer June in any one’s memory. The damask roses and mignonette below the verandah had never sent such a breath of summer through the tall French windows; the gnarled orange-trees brought out from the old arcaded{170} orange-house had never been so thickly blossomed; the very haycocks on the lawn gave out whiffs of Araby.
{170}
The evening before the wedding Delia Ralston sat on the verandah watching the moon rise across the Sound. She was tired with the multitude of last preparations, and sad at the thought of Tina’s going. On the following evening the house would be empty: till death came, she and Charlotte would sit alone together beside the evening lamp. Such repinings were foolish—they were, she reminded herself, “not like her.” But too many memories stirred and murmured in her: her heart was haunted. As she closed the door on the silent drawing-room—already transformed into a chapel, with its lace-hung altar, the tall alabaster vases awaiting their white
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