And so the wedding had taken place with all the necessary trimmings:  awning over the carpeted sidewalk; four policemen on the curb; detectives in the hall and up the staircase and in the front bedroom where the jewels were exposed (all the directors of the Mukton Lode were represented); crowds lining the sidewalk; mob outside the church door—­mob inside the church door and clear up to the altar; flowers, palms, special choir, with little bank-notes to the boys and a big bank-note to the leader; checks for the ranking clergyman and the two assistant clergymen, not forgetting crisp bills for the sexton and the janitor and the policemen and the detectives and everybody else who could hold out a hand and not be locked up in jail for highway robbery.  Yes, a most fashionable and a most distinguished and a most exclusive wedding—­there was no mistake about that.

No one had ever seen anything like it before; some hoped they never would again, so great was the crush in the drawing-room.  And not only in the drawing-room, but over every square inch of the house for that matter, from the front door where Parkins’s assistant (an extra man from Delmonico’s) shouted out—­“Third floor back for the gentlemen and second floor front for the ladies”—­to the innermost recesses of the library made over into a banquet hall, where that great functionary himself was pouring champagne into batteries of tumblers as if it were so much water, and distributing cuts of cold salmon and portions of terrapin with the prodigality of a charity committee serving a picnic.

And then the heartaches over the cards that never came; and the presents that were never sent, and the wrath of the relations who got below the ribbon in the church and the airs of the strangers who got above it; and the tears over the costly dresses that did not arrive in time and the chagrin over those they had to wear or stay at home—­and the heat and the jam and tear and squeeze—­and the aftermath of wet glasses on inlaid tables and fine-spun table-cloths burnt into holes with careless cigarettes; and the little puddles of ice cream on the Turkish rugs and silk divans and the broken glass and smashed china!—­No—­there never had been such a wedding!

This over, Corinne and Garry had gone to housekeeping in a dear little flat, to which we may be sure Jack was rarely ever invited (he had only received “cards” to the church, an invitation which he had religiously accepted, standing at the door so he could bow to them both as they passed)—­the two, I say, had gone to a dear little flat—­so dear, in fact, that before the year was out Garry’s finances were in such a deplorable condition that the lease could not be renewed, and another and a cheaper nest had to be sought for.