“Charley—­I—­You—­”

“Jess—­over here!  Quick!”

“Charley—­honey—­”

* * * * *

At eleven o’clock a small, watery moon cut through a sky that was fleecily clouded—­a swift moon that rode fast as a ship.  It rode over but did not light Squire Gerber’s one-and-a-half-storied, weathered-gray, and set-slightly-in-a-hollow house on Claxton countryside.

Three motor-cars, their engines chugging out into wide areas of stillness, stood processional at the curb.  A red hall light showed against the door-pane and two lower-story windows were widely illuminated.

Within that room of chromos and the cold horsehair smell of unaired years, silence, except for the singing of three gas-jets, had momentarily fallen, a dozen or so flushed faces, grotesquely sobered, staring through the gaseous fog, the fluttering lids of a magistrate whose lips habitually fluttered, just lifting from his book.

A hysterical catch of breath from Miss Vera de Long broke the ear-splitting silence.  She reached out, the three plumes dipping down the bare V of her back, for the limp hand of the bride.

“Gawd bless you, dearie; it’s a big night’s work!”

* * * * *

In the tallest part of St. Louis, its busiest thoroughfares inclosing it in a rectangle, the Hotel Sherman, where traveling salesmen with real alligator bags and third-finger diamonds habitually shake their first Pullman dust, rears eighteen stories up through and above an aeriality of soft-coal smoke, which fits over the rim of the city like a skull-cap.

In the Louis Quinze, gilt-bedded, gilt-framed, gilt-edged bridal-suite de luxe on the seventeenth floor, Mrs. Charley Cox sat rigid enough and in shirt-waisted incongruity on the lower curl of a gilt divan that squirmed to represent the letter S.

“Charley—­are you—­sorry?”

He wriggled out of his dust-coat, tossing it on the gilt-canopied bed and crossed to her, lifting off her red sailor.

“Now that’s a fine question for a ten-hours’ wifey to ask her hubby, ain’t it?  Am I sorry, she asks me before the wedding crowd has turned the corner.  Lord, honey, I never expected anything like you to happen to me!”

She stroked his coat-sleeve, mouthing back tears.

“Now everybody’ll say—­you’re a goner—­for sure—­marrying a—­Popular Store girl.”

“If anybody got the worst of this bargain, it’s my girl.”

“My own boy,” she said, still battling with tears.

“You drew a black sheep, honey, but I say again and again, ’Thank God, you drew one with golden fleece!’”

“That—­that’s the trouble, Charley—­there’s just no way to make a boy with money know you married him for any other reason.”

“I’m not blaming you, honey.  Lord! what have I got besides money to talk for me?”

“Lots.  Why—­like Jess says, Charley, when you get to squaring your lips and jerking up your head, there’s nothing in the world you can’t do that you set out to do.”