Most of them were of that young married set which Margaret preferred, to the anger and disgust of her grandmother and against the entreaties of her own common sense.

"The last place in the world to look for a husband," Madam Bowker had said again and again, to both her daughter and her granddaughter.

"Their talk is all in ridicule of marriage, and of every sacred thing.

And if there are any bachelors, they have come--well, certainly not in search of honorable wedlock." The room was noisily gay; but Margaret, at the tea-table in a rather somber brown dress with a big brown hat, whose great plumes shadowed her pale, somewhat haggard face, was evidently not in one of her sparkling moods.

The headache powder and the nap had not been successful.