She was full of smiles and cordial greetings for the bride, who did not even see her.

Neither did Ellen Carley see the awkward figure of her bridegroom.

A mist was before her eyes, as if there had been an atmosphere of summer blight or fog in the village church.

She knelt, or rose, as her prayer-book taught her, and went through the solemn service as placidly as if she had been a wondrous piece of mechanism constructed to perform such movements; and then, like a creature in a dream, she found herself walking out of the church presently, with her hand on Stephen Whitelaw's arm.

She had a faint consciousness of some ceremony in the vestry, where it had taken Stephen a long time to sign his name in the register, and where the clergyman had congratulated him upon his good fortune in having won for himself such a pretty young wife; but it was all more or less like a dreadful oppressive dream.