With a curious freedom from emotion of any sort, she selected a hat, and laid her gloves beside it on the bed.  Just then the front door, below her, opened to admit the noise of hurried feet and of joyous laughter.  Several voices were talking at once.  Mary, to whom the group was still invisible, recognized one of these as belonging to Mamma.  As she went downstairs, she had only time for one apprehensive thrill, before Mamma herself ran about the curve of the stairway, and flung herself into Mary’s arms.

Mamma was dressed in corn-colored silk, over which an exquisite wrap of the same shade fell in rich folds.  Her hat was a creation of pale yellow plumes and hydrangeas, her silk stockings and little boots corn-colored.  She dragged the bewildered Mary down the stairway, and Mary, pausing at the landing, looked dazedly at her husband, who stood in the hall below with a dark, middle-aged man whom she had never seen before.

“Here she is!” Mamma cried joyously.  “Richie, come kiss her right this minute!  Ma’y, darling, this is your new papa!”

“What!” said Mary, faintly.  But before she knew it the strange man did indeed kiss her, and then George kissed her, and Mamma kissed her again, and all three shouted with laughter as they went over and over the story.  Mary, in all the surprise and confusion, still found time to marvel at the sight of George’s radiant face.

“Carter—­of all people!” said George, with a slap on the groom’s shoulder.  “I loved his dea’ wife like a sister!” Mamma threw in parenthetically, displaying to Mary’s eyes her little curled-up fist with a diamond on it quite the width of the finger it adorned.  “Strangely enough,” said Mr. Carter, in a deep, dignified boom, “your husband and I had never met until to-day, Mrs.—­ah, Mary—­ when-” his proud eye travelled to the corn-colored figure, “when this young lady of mine introduced us!”

“Though we’ve exchanged letters, eh?” George grinned, cutting the wires of a champagne bottle.  For they were about the dining-room table now, and the bride’s health was to be drunk.

Mary, managing with some effort to appear calm, outwardly congratulatory, interested, and sympathetic; and already feeling somewhere far down in her consciousness an exhilarated sense of amusement and relief at this latest performance of Mamma’s,—­was nevertheless chiefly conscious of a deep and swelling indignation against George.

George!  Oh, he could laugh now; he could kiss, compliment, rejoice with Mamma now, he could welcome and flatter Richard Carter now, although he had repudiated and insulted the one but a few hours ago, and had for years found nothing good to say of the other!  He could delightedly involve Mary in his congratulations and happy prophecies now, when but today he had half broken her heart!

“Lovely!” she said, smiling automatically and rising with the others when the bridegroom laughingly proposed a toast to the firm that might some day be “Venable and Carter,” and George insisted upon drinking it standing, and, “Oh, of course, I understand how sudden it all was, darling!” “Oh, Mamma, won’t that be heavenly!” she responded with apparent rapture to the excited outpourings of the bride.  But at her heart was a cold, dull weight, and her sober eyes went again and again to her husband’s face.