That night, after the bridal pair had departed and everybody else had gone to bed, Anna Carroll and her brother had a little conference in the parlor amid the debris of the wedding splendor.  The flowers and greens were drooping, the room and the whole house had that peculiar phase of squalidness which comes alone from the ragged ends of festivities; the floors were strewn with rice and rose leaves and crumbs from the feast; plates and cups and saucers or fragments stood about everywhere; the chairs and the tables were in confusion.  Anna, who had been locking up the silver for the night, had come into the parlor, and found her brother standing in a curious, absent-minded fashion in the middle of the floor.

“Why, Arthur!” said she.  “I thought you had gone to bed.”

“I am going,” said he, but he made no move.

Anna looked at him, and her expression was weary and a little bitter.  “Well, it is over,” said she.

Carroll nodded.  “Yes,” he said, with a half-suppressed sigh.

Anna glanced around the room.  “This house is a sight for one maid to wrestle with,” said she; and her brother, beyond a glance of the utmost indifference around the chaotic room, did not seem to notice her remark at all.  However, that she did not resent.  Indeed, she herself was so far from taking the matter to heart that she laughed a little as she continued to survey the ruins.

“Well, it went off well; it was a pretty wedding,” said she, with a certain tone of pleasure.

Carroll turned to her quite eagerly.  “You think Ina was pleased?” he said.  “It was all as she wished it to be?”

“What could a girl have wished more?” cried Anna.  “Everything was charming, just as it should be.  All I think about is—­”

“What?” asked her brother.

“We have danced,” said Anna.  “What I want to know is, is the piper to be paid, or shall we have to dance to another tune by way of reprisal.”

“The piper is paid,” replied Carroll, shortly.  He turned to go, but his sister stepped in front of him.

“How?” she said.

Carroll looked down at her.

“Yes, you are quite right, Arthur,” said she.  “I am afraid.  You are, or may reasonably be, rather a desperate man.  You have never taken quite kindly to straits.  If the piper is paid, I want to know how, for my own peace of mind.  By the piper I mean the creditors for all this”—­she glanced around the room—­“the wedding flowers and feast and carriages.”

“I earned enough honestly,” replied Carroll.  He had a strangely straightforward, almost boyish way of meeting her sharp gaze.

“How?”

“You had better not press the matter, Anna.”

“I do.  I am afraid.”  She responded to his look with a certain bitter, sarcastic insistence.  “I have reason to be,” said she.  “You know I have, Arthur Carroll.  We are all on the edge of a precipice, but I, for one, do not intend to let you drag me over, and I do not intend that Amy and the children shall go, either, if I can help it.  I want to know where you got the money to pay for the wedding expenses, and I want to know where you got that pearl ring you gave Ina.  It never cost a cent under three hundred dollars.”