and
unhappiness were gone. He felt only that yearning for, and terror
for, that little, tender soul that he loved, exposed to all the
terrible and ancient solemn might of existence, which the centuries
had rolled up until her time came. He longed to shield her not only
from sorrow, but from joy. He took off his hat and stood back in the
shadow of a door on the opposite sidewalk. It seemed to him that the
ceremony would never end. It was, in fact, unusually long, for the
Banbridge minister had much to say for the edification of the bridal
pair, and for his own aggrandizement. But at last the triumphant peal
of the organ burst forth, and the church swarmed like a hive. People
began to stir.

All the heads turned. The rustle of silk was quite audible from
outside, also a gathering sibilance of whispers and rustling stir of
curious humanity, exactly like the swarming impetus of a hive. Fans
fluttered like butterflies over all this agitation of heaving
shoulders and turning heads in the church. Outside, the people
standing about the steps and on the sidewalk separated hurriedly and
formed an aisle of gaping curiosity. A carriage streaming with white
ribbons rolled up, the others fell into line. Anderson could see
Samson Rawdy on the white-ribboned wedding-coach, sitting in majesty.
He was paid well in advance; his wife, complacent and beaming in her
new silk waist, was in the church. The contemplation of the new
marriage had brought a wave of analogous happiness and fresh love for
her over his soul. He was as happy with his own measure of happiness
as any one there. Every happiness as well as every sorrow is a source
of centrifugal attraction.

Anderson, watching, saw presently, the bridal party emerge from the
church. To his fancy, which naturally looked for similes to his
beloved pursuits of life, he saw the bride like a white moth of the
night, her misty veil, pendant from her head to her feet, carrying
out the pale, slanting evanescence of the moth's wings. She moved
with a slight wavering motion suggestive of the flight of the vague
winged thing which flits from darkness to darkness when it does not
perish in the candle beams. This moth, to Anderson, was doing the
latter, fluttering possibly to her death, in the light of that awful
primaeval force of love upon which the continuance of creation hangs.
Again, a great pity for her overwhelmed him, and a very fierceness of
protection seized him at the sight of Charlotte