Let's Kiss and Part

13

Thursday morning dawned fair and sunny with all traces of Tuesday night's storm swept away—the streets clean, the skies blue, the air crisply cold—the day set for Angeline Jennings's funeral and Frank Adler's wedding.

In the grand parlor of Mrs. Frensh's home, the dead girl lay like one asleep, in a white casket banked with rarest flowers whose delicate perfume pervaded the whole house. In yesterday's newspapers a brief announcement had been made:

"Died. —Suddenly, at her mother's residence, No. 1512A Fifth Avenue, Tuesday evening, Darling, only daughter of Mrs. Camelia French.

"Friends and relatives of the family are respectfully invited to attend the funeral services from the family residence, Thursday noon. Interment at Greenwood."

In other columns of the newspaper longer, paragraphs were given to the grand noon wedding of the young millionaire, Frank Adler, to the brilliant society belle and heiress, Miss Cassidy Ellyson. It would be a grand church wedding and the floral decorations were superb, while the trousseau, lately arrived from Paris, was simply magnificent. Pictures of the prospective bride and groom, intertwined with true lovers' knots, were duly printed for the benefit of an admiring public.

As the hour of noon drew near, Mrs. Frensh's house was filled with sympathetic guests, to whose ears had floated rumors of the sad ending of her long grief for her stolen child—recovered only in death. When they saw Darling French in her coffin—her mother had never given her any name but Darling—they wept in sympathy with the bereaved heart from whom this lovely treasure had been so cruelly wrested by the grim King of Terrors.

The beautiful Episcopal service was read, the mother's farewell kiss pressed on the cold, white brow, the casket closed, and borne out to the white-plumed hearse, the carriages were filled with the mother and friends, and the solemn cortège moved away to Greenwood, where the grim family vault had been opened to receive another scion of the old house of Van Dorn, the fairest of all its fair daughters.

At the same time only a block away, on the same avenue, a bridal train was leaving the Van Dorn mansion for the church.

Life and death jostling each other almost side by side!

In one carriage sat the bride, with her cousins, the Van Dorn's, and her dark, brilliant beauty was at its best, enhanced by the snowy bridal robes and the joy that flashed from her eyes at the thought that she would soon be the bride of the man she adored.

Adler and his best man were to meet them at the church, the bridegroom having recovered sufficiently from his sprain that he could walk without a crutch.

In the sunshine of the brilliant day the two processions met and passed each other, the bridal train and the funeral cortège—Cassidy going to her bridal, her rival to her grave!

The bride's eyes were riveted on the white, flower-banked casket, and her florid color faded to ashen pallor while she shrank back shuddering:

"It is an evil omen to meet a corpse on the way to one's wedding!"

"Do not give way to such fancies, dear," Mrs. van Dorn answered soothingly, but she also grew pale with superstition, though having heard all about Angeline from Cassidy, she thought inwardly:

"Though it is evil-omened to meet a funeral on the way to one's wedding, yet I fancy Cassidy is more fortunate to meet her rival dead than living. Though Frank treated that poor girl very badly, I believe that secret remorse is gnawing at his heart, and if she had lived, who knows how it all might have turned out?

Frank has appeared very strange to me these past two days—pale, distrait, and sad—the result of keen remorse, no doubt, but does he love Cassidy as well as before, I wonder! This encounter with the dead girl has shaken my nerves, and I feel uneasy. I wish the wedding was well over, and the knot safely tied for Cassidy's sake. I hope he will be sure to meet us promptly at the church!"