When the tall clock in the south room struck eight, there was a hush among these few who had learned to flock gracefully, chattering like birds, bearing always the same aspect to one another, without regard to selfish joys or pains.  The lawyer’s wife, in a grand gown and topknot of feathers, which she was said to have worn to a great party at the governor’s house in Boston, composed to majestic approval her handsome florid face, and stood back with a white-gloved hand on an arm of each of her daughters, slender and pretty, and unshrinkingly radiant in the faces of the doctor’s college-bred son and his visiting classmate.  The doctor’s wife, also, who had come of a grand family, and appeared always on festive occasions in some well-preserved splendor of her maiden days, which had been prolonged, drew back, spreading out with both hands a vast expanse of purple velvet skirt.  She quite eclipsed as with a murky purple cloud the two meek elderly women and a timid young girl who sat behind her.  They immediately peered around her sumptuous folds with anxious eyes lest they might lose sight of the bridal party; but the bridal party did not come.

A passageway was left quite clear to the space between the windows on the west side of the room, where it was whispered the bride and groom were to stand, and the people all pressed back towards the walls; but no one came.  A little hum of wondering conversation rose and fell again at fancied stirs of entrance.  Folk hushed and nudged each other a dozen times, and craned their necks, and the clock struck the half-hour, and the bridal party had not come.

In a great chair near the clear space between the windows sat the bridegroom’s mother, with a large pearl brooch gleaming out of the black satin folds on her bosom.  Her face, between long lace lappets, looked as clearly pallid and passively reflective as the pearls.  Not a muscle stirred about her calm mouth and the smooth triangle of forehead between her curtain slants of gray hair.  If she speculated deeply within herself, and was agitated over the delay, not a restless glance of her steadily mild eyes betrayed it.

People wondered a little that she should not be busied about the bridal preparations, instead of waiting there like any other guest; but it was said that Dorothy had refused absolutely to have any helping hands but those of her old black slave woman about her.  It was known, too, that Dorothy had only once taken tea with Burr’s mother since the engagement, and everybody speculated as to how they would get on together.  Dorothy had, in truth, received the rigorously courteous overtures of her future mother with the polite offishness of a scared but well-trained child, and the proud elder woman had not increased them.

“When she comes here to live I shall do my duty by her, but I shall not force myself upon her,” she told Burr.  Burr’s mother had not seen any of the dainty bridal gewgaws, but that she kept to herself.  People glanced frequently at her with questioning eyes as the time went on; but she sat there with the gleam of her personality as unchanged in her face as the gleam of the pearls on her bosom.