"She was looking beautiful; more beautiful than any one had seen her look for weeks. A bright color suffused her delicate cheeks, and in her eyes burned a strange excitement, which did the work of happiness in lighting up her face. But it was a transient glow which faded imperceptibly but surely, as the ceremony proceeded, and passed completely away as the last inexorable words were uttered which made her the wife of the false being at her side.
"He, on the contrary, was pale up to that same critical moment--very pale, when one remembers his naturally florid complexion; but as her color went, his rose, and when the minister withdrew, and friends began to crowd around them, he grew so jovial and so noisy that more than one person glanced at him with suspicion, and cast pitying looks at the now quiet and immobile young wife.
"Meantime I sought with eager anxiety to catch one more glimpse of Marah. But she had shrunk from sight, and was not to be found. And the gayety ran high and the wine was poured freely, and the bridegroom drank with ever-increasing excitement, toasting his bride, but never looking at her, though her eyes turned more than once upon him with an appeal that affected painfully more than one person in the crowd. At last she rose, and, at this signal, he put down his glass, and, with a low bow to the company, prepared to follow her from the room. They passed close to the place where I stood, and I caught one glance from his eyes. It was a laughing one, but there was uneasiness in it. There might have been something more, but I had not time to search for it, for at that moment I felt her dress brush against my sleeve, and turned to give her the smile which I knew her friendly heart demanded.
"'You will wait till we go?' fell in a whisper from her lips; and I nodded with another smile, and they went on and I stood where they had left me, in one of those moods which made me, as far as all human intercourse is concerned, as much of an isolated being as I am in these mountains. I did not wake again from this abstraction till that same premonitory feeling, of which I have so often spoken, told me that something in which I was deeply interested was about to happen. Looking up, I found myself in the room alone. During the hour of my abstraction the guests had gone out, and I had neither noticed their departure nor the gradual cessation of the noise which at one time had filled my ears with hubbub. But the bride had not gone. She was at that moment coming down the stairs, and it was this fact which had pierced to my inner consciousness, and aroused once more in me a vivid sense of my surroundings. He was with her, and behind them, gliding like a wraith from landing to landing, came Marah, clad like the bride in a traveling dress, but without the bonnet which betokened an instant departure.