She wore a black velvet ribbon tied around her throat, and from it hung a little gold locket—­one of the few treasures of her mother’s girlhood.  Elmira had tended a little pot of rose-geranium in a south window all winter.  This spring it was full of pale pink bloom.  She had made a little chaplet of the fragrant leaves and flowers to adorn her smooth dark hair, and also a pretty knot for her breast.  Her skirt was ruffled to her slender waist with tiniest frills of the diaphanous muslin.  Elmira in her party gown looked like a double white flower herself.

As for Jerome, he felt awkwardly self-conscious in his new clothes, but bore himself so proudly as to conceal it.  It requires genuine valor to overcome new clothes, when one seldom has them.  They become, under such circumstances, more than clothes—­they are at least skin-deep.  However, Jerome had that valor.  He had bought a suit of fine blue cloth, and a vest of flowered white satin like a bridegroom’s.  He wore his best shirt with delicate cambric ruffles on bosom and wristbands, and his throat was swathed in folds of sheerest lawn, which he kept his chin clear of, with a splendid and stately lift.  Jerome’s hair, which was darker than when he was a boy, was brushed carefully into a thick crest over his white forehead, which had, like a child’s, a bold and innocent fulness of curve at the temples.  He had not usually much color, but that night his cheeks were glowing, and his black eyes, commonly somewhat stern from excess of earnestness, were brilliant with the joy of youth.

Mrs. Edwards looked at one, then the other, with the delighted surprise of a mother bird who sees her offspring in their first gayety of full plumage.  She picked a thread from Jerome’s coat, she put back a stray lock of Elmira’s hair, she bade them turn this way and that.

When they had started she hitched her chair close to the window, pressed her forehead against the glass, looked out, and watched the white flutter of Elmira’s skirts until they disappeared in the dark folds of the night.

There was, that night, a soft commotion of air rather than any distinct current of wind, like a gentle heaving and subsidence of veiled breasts of nature.  The tree branches spread and gloomed with deeper shadows; mysterious white things with indeterminate motions were seen aloof across meadows or in door-yards, and might have been white-clad women, or flowering bushes, or ghosts.

Jerome and Elmira, when one of these pale visions seemed floating from some shadowy gateway ahead, wondered to each other if this or that girl were just starting for the party, but when they drew near the whiteness stirred at the gate still, and was only a bush of bridal-wreath.  Jerome and Elmira were really the last on the road to the party; Upham people went early to festivities.

“It is very late,” Elmira said, nervously; she held up her white skirts, ruffling softly to the wind, with both hands, lest they trail the dewy grass, and flew along like a short-winged bird at her brother’s side.  “Please walk faster, Jerome,” said she.