ouse full of
noisy stir, the crowd of relatives and friends in festive attire, the
stamping of the horses' feet before the great open gate, the neighbors
standing at the windows, and the little street-boys scuffling upon the
pavement, all the joyous bustle of that happy day. It seemed to Sulpice
that the sunlight came streaming in with Adrienne's entrance into the
vast salon, from the walls of which her pictured ancestresses in their
huge leg-of-mutton sleeves seemed to smile at her.

Beneath the orange wreath sent from Paris, her face expressed the happy,
surprised, and sweetly anxious look of a young communicant wrapped in
her veil.

Sulpice had never seen her look more beautiful. How prettily she came
towards him, blushing vividly, and holding out her two little white
gloved hands! He, somewhat bored by the company that surrounded them,
cast an involuntary glance at a mirror hanging opposite and decided that
he looked awkward and formal with his hair too carefully arranged. How
they had laughed since then and always with new pleasure at these
recollections, so sweet even now.

His happiness on that joyous day would have been complete had his mother
been present, when in the presence of the old priest who had instructed
Adrienne in her catechism, Sulpice stood forward and took by its velvet
shield the taper that seemed so light to him, and awkwardly held the
wafer that the priest extended to him. It was a great event in Grenoble
when the leader of the Liberal Party, who headed the list at the last
election, was seen being married like a believing bourgeois. The organ
pealed forth its tender vibrations, some Christmas anthem, mysterious
and tremulous, like an alleluia sounding through the aisles of
centuries; the light streamed through the windows in floods and rested
upon Adrienne, who was kneeling with her childlike head leaning on her
gloved hands, kissing her fair locks with sunlight and illumining the
gleaming satin of her dress with its long train spreading out over the
carpet.

Sulpice took away from this ceremony in the presence of a crowded
congregation an impression at once perfumed and dazzling: the perfumes
of flowers, the play of light, the greetings of the organ, and within
and about him, all the intoxication of love, singing a song of
happiness.

All that was now far away! nearly six years had elapsed since that day,
six years of bitter struggle, during which Vaudrey fought the harder,
defended hi