ose two women being offered up for him, would have
been a happy man.

And the mother, by this time, knew that it was all a mistake--a mistake,
alas, which she, in her blindness, had fostered.

No wonder that she trembled as she prayed.

The service, that portion of it which makes two people man and wife,
was over; the clergyman was reading the final exhortation to the
newly-married pair.

They stood together close to the altar rails. The bride was in a pale
lavender satin, covered with lace, which spread far away behind her
across the tesselated pavement. The bridegroom stood by her side, erect
and handsome, but pale and stern, and with a far-away look in his eyes
that would have made any one fancy, had any one been near enough or
attentive enough to remark it, that he was only an indifferent spectator
of the scene, in no way interested in what was going on. He looked as if
he were thinking of something else.

He was thinking of something else. He was thinking of a railway carriage,
of a train rushing onwards through a fog-blotted landscape, and of two
arms, warm and soft, cast up round his neck, and a trembling, passionate
voice, ever crying in his ears--

"While you live I will never marry another man."

That was what the bridegroom was thinking about.

As to the bride, she was debating to herself whether she should have the
body of her wedding-dress cut V or square when she left it with her
dressmaker to be altered into a dinner-dress.

Meanwhile the clergyman, who mumbled his words slightly, and whose
glasses kept on tumbling off his nose, waded through the several duties
of husbands towards their wives, and of wives towards their husbands, as
expounded by Scripture, in a monotonous undertone, until, to the great
relief of the weary guests, the ceremony at last came to an end.

Then the best man, Sir John, who stood behind his brother, looking, if
possible, more like a mute at a funeral even than the bridegroom himself,
stepped forward out of the shadow. The new-married couple went into the
vestry, followed by Sir John, his mother, and a select few, upon which
the door was closed. All the rest of the company then began to chatter
in audible whispers together; they fidgeted backwards and forwards,
from one pew to the other. There were jokes, and smiles, and nods, and
hand-shakings between the different members of the wedding party. All in
a low and decorous undertone, of course, but still there was a disti