Her beautiful face was calm, but very pale.

It bore strongly the impress of sorrow, but not of that hopeless sorrow which we so often see on these mournful occasions.
It was very plain that her thoughts were not lingering around the shrouded and coffined form of what was once her mother's body, but were following her into the world beyond our mortal vision, as we follow a dear friend who has gone from us on a long journey.
And thus it was that Blanche Montgomery entered upon her new life.
Death's shadow fell upon the torch of Hymen.

There was a rain of grief just as the sun of love poured forth his brightest beams, and the bow which spanned the horizon gave, in that hour of grief, sweet promise for the future.
These exciting events in the experience of our young friends had come upon us so suddenly, that our minds were half bewildered.

A few weeks served, however, to bring all things into a right adjustment with our own daily life and thought, and Ivy Cottage became one of the places that grew dearer to us for the accumulating memories of pleasant hours spent there with true-hearted ones who were living for something more than the unreal things of this world.
How many times was the life that beat so feverishly in the Allen House, and that which moved to such even pulsings in Ivy Cottage, contrasted in my observation! Ten years of a marriage such as Delia Floyd so unwisely consummated, had not served for the development of her inner life to any right purpose.

She had kept on in the wrong way taken by her feet in the beginning, growing purse proud, vain, ambitious of external pre-eminence, worldly-minded, and self-indulgent.