for them and struggled with them
until drops of perspiration rolled from his forehead and fell
upon his coarse, matted brown beard. But he believed what he
said, and language was so little an accomplishment with him that
he was not tempted to say more than he believed. He had been a
drummer boy in the Civil War, on the losing side, and he was a
simple, courageous man.

Ralph was to be both usher and best man. Gladys Farmer could not
be one of the bridesmaids because she was to play the wedding
march. At eight o'clock Enid and Claude came downstairs together,
conducted by Ralph and followed by four girls dressed in white,
like the bride. They took their places under the arch before the
preacher. He began with the chapter from Genesis about the
creation of man, and Adam's rib, reading in a laboured manner, as
if he did not quite know why he had selected that passage and was
looking for something he did not find. His nose-glasses kept
falling off and dropping upon the open book. Throughout this
prolonged fumbling Enid stood calm, looking at him respectfully,
very pretty in her short veil. Claude was so pale that he looked
unnatural,--nobody had ever seen him like that before. His face,
between his very black clothes and his smooth, sandy hair, was
white and severe, and he uttered his responses in a hollow voice.
Mahailey, at the back of the room, in a black hat with green
gooseberries on it, was standing, in order to miss nothing. She
watched Mr. Snowberry as if she hoped to catch some visible sign
of the miracle he was performing. She always wondered just what
it was the preacher did to make the wrongest thing in the world
the rightest thing in the world.

When it was over, Enid went upstairs to put on her travelling
dress, and Ralph and Gladys began seating the guests for supper.
Just twenty minutes later Enid came down and took her place
beside Claude at the head of the long table. The company rose and
drank the bride's health in grape-juice punch. Mr. Royce,
however, while the guests were being seated, had taken Mr.
Wheeler down to the fruit cellar, where the two old friends drank
off a glass of well-seasoned Kentucky whiskey, and shook hands.
When they came back to the table, looking younger than when they
withdrew, the preacher smelled the tang of spirits and felt
slighted. He looked disconsolately into his ruddy goblet and
thought about the marriage at Cana. He tried to apply his Bible
literally to life and, t