They slipped into the back of the caterer’s car; that is, one young chef and the nurse slipped in, and one chef stayed behind. And not even the careful watchers in the yard had a suspicion. The back door of the car was slammed, and a driver got into the front seat and put his foot on the starter.

“Oh, by the way,” said John Saxon, slipping up again to the little window at the back of the car, “I liked your Miss Foster a lot. Thanks for helping me to meet her!”

“But you didn’t meet her,” giggled the young woman in the nurse’s uniform.

“Oh, but I did,” said John heartily. “We didn’t mind a little thing like that. We introduced ourselves!”

“Oh, but you didn’t,” cried the soft voice again. “She wasn’t there at all!”

But the driver had put his foot on the starter and the car clattered away, and John was none the wiser for that last sentence.

He stole back through the servants’ corridors, rid himself of his disguise, and mingled again with the guests unobtrusively.

“Oh, hello!” said someone presently. “Here’s the best man! Where are they, Mr. Saxon? Which way are they coming down?”

“Why, there isn’t any way but the elevator, is there?” said John innocently. “Jeff was all ready when I left him.”

There was excited gathering of guests in little groups, then the appearance of the bride’s mother, smiling and a bit teary about the lashes, brought about a state of eager intensity. The elevator came and went, and there was a dead silence every time it opened its noisy doors to let out some guest of the house. They all stood in the big entrance hall clutching their handfuls of paper rose leaves and rice and confetti. Outside the door stood a big car belonging to Mr. Warren Wainwright, understood to be the going-away car, well decorated in white satin ribbons and old shoes and appropriate sentiments, but time went on and nothing happened!

“I’m going up to see what has happened!” announced Mary Elizabeth, when excitement grew to white heat and suspicion began to grow into a low rumble of anxiety.

She stepped into the elevator and disappeared, and a breath of relief went up from the guests.

Then Mary Elizabeth descended again with the great bouquet of white orchids in her hand! The bouquet that every one of those four bridesmaids had so longed to be able to catch for herself!

And when they saw the orchids, it did not need Mary Elizabeth’s dramatic announcement—“She’s gone! And I’ve got the orchids!”—to tell what had happened.

A howl went up from the disappointed tricksters, and if it had been anybody else but Mary Elizabeth with her bright, friendly smile, she might have been mobbed.

But Mary Elizabeth had disappeared in the excitement and slipped up to her room, and by the time the guests had begun to drift away, she appeared with a long dark wrap over her arm, jingling her key ring placidly, with no offending orchids in sight. When John came back after seeing Camilla’s mother to her room as he had promised Jeff he would do, there she was sitting demurely in the alcove, the long satin cloak covering her delicate dress, and her eyes like two stars, waiting for him.

It thrilled him anew to see her there and meet her welcoming smile, just as if they had been belonging to each other for a long time. Even in the brief interval of his absence he had been doubting that it could be true that he had found a girl like that. Surely the glamour would have faded when he got back to her.

But there she was, a real flesh-and-blood girl, as lovely in the simple lines of the soft black satin cloak as she had been in the radiant rosy chiffons.

She had taken off her gloves, and he thrilled again to draw her hand within his arm as they went out to the car.

The doorman put his bags in the back of the car, and Mary Elizabeth drove away from the blaze of light that enveloped the whole front of the hotel. They were alone. Really alone for the first time since he had seen her! And suddenly he was tongue-tied!

He wanted to take her in his arms, but a great shyness had come upon him. He wanted to tell her what was in his heart for her, but there were no words adequate. Each one, as he selected it and cast it aside as unfit, seemed presumptuous.

John Saxon had a deep reverence for womanhood. He had acquired that from the teaching of his little plain, quiet mother. He had a deep scorn for modern progressive girls with bloody-looking lips, plucked eyebrows, and applied eyelashes. Girls who acquired men as so many scalps to hang at their belts, who smoked insolently and strutted around in trousers, long or short. He turned away from such in disgust. He hated their cocksure ways, their arrogance, their assumption of rights, their insolence against all things sacred. He had had a great doubt in his mind about even Camilla until he had seen her, watched her, talked with her, proved her to be utterly unspoiled in spite of her wonderful golden head and her smartly plain attire.

And now to find another girl with beauty and brightness and culture, who assumed none of the manners he hated, almost brought back his faith in true womanhood. Certainly he reverenced this girl beside him as if God had just handed her to him fresh out of heaven.

“Well,” said Mary Elizabeth presently as she whirled the car around a corner and glided down a wide street overarched with elm trees, “aren’t you wasting a great deal of time? Where are all those things you were going to say and didn’t have time for while we walked down that aisle?”

“Forgive me,” he said. “It seemed enough just to be sitting by your side. I was trying to make it seem real.