Mary was the sole surviving daughter of the wealthy drygoods merchants, Martin and Edna O'Keefe. The year was 1898, and she was so enthralled with spring, not only due to the profusion of redbuds, wisteria, and snowbells that lined the short path fromm her home to the Episcopal church, but because of the Spring cotillion, where this year she would be able to dance with someone other than her father or her girlfriends. She had turned 16 and would be a debutante. Her mother had promised her she could have any dress that she desired from their shop, and her mother would alter it to fit her girlish frame.

Long before the dance, music had wafted through Mary's head, beautiful music that she had heard at previous balls when she had to wait on the sidelines or help serve punch to the dancers. Now she practiced the steps she had watched the debutantes dance last year and the year before, believing she could hear a whole orchestra playing in her head, though she hardly knew what one would sound like.

On the night of the dance, she looked stunning in the dress she had chosen: pink satin with black trim. Though the musicians were only the organist from church playing piano, the druggist on fiddle, and the schoolteacher on a snare drum, she felt like she was in the grandest ballroom in the world when Randolph, a boy she knew from church asked her to dance.

True, he was four years her senior and had been to cotillions before. She had seen him dancing with Margaret the year before, and she told Mary he wasn't nearly as interesting as Eddy Van Thiel. Margaret would fall for Eddy, but Mary had always held a flame for Randolph. Maybe it was the thin moustache and sideburns he was able to grow or the fact that tonight he was particularly dashing in his National Guard uniform. Though she did dance with others, Randolph was her near constant companion, and late in the evening, he confessed that he had always admired her and slipped a silver ring into her hand. Tomorrow, he said, he would be shipping out to Cuba to take revenge for the sinking of the Maine, which was why he asked her to slip into the shadows and give him just one kiss before he had to leave.