Her Reputation by Talbot Mundy

The wedding was set for afternoon, to allow for the arrival of the special train from New Orleans, and to give guests from neighboring counties time to come by motor. The dining-room and Don Andres' private chapel being much too small for all that crowd, a bower of flowers was set up in the garden, where the ceremony might take place in full view of every one. The wedding breakfast was to take place in the patio directly after the ceremony, and an army of experts took charge of that; the patio looked like a hanging garden in ancient Babylon roofed by a canopy of flowers, under which the gargoyle fountain took on the resemblance of a heathen idol grinning four ways simultaneously.

By dawn the plantation darkies were already celebrating; by nine o'clock the whole countryside was swarming through the grounds, for there was no question of Don Andres' popularity, and no doubt that anything he might do would be worth recording in the annals of Louisiana. Grand seigneurs are a dying race, and out of fashion, but liberal when they let the bars down. There were probably a thousand guests, invited and uninvited (the papers said three thousand); and there were a thousand reasons for being there, not least of which was curiosity, which Jacqueline assuaged in full.