r, and the long-shaped books, bound in brown
leather, which were on the table. I was incapable of speaking--incapable
even of thinking--during that interval of expectation.

At length the clergyman arrived, and we went into the church--the
church, with its desolate array of empty pews, and its chill, heavy,
week-day atmosphere. As we ranged ourselves round the altar, a confusion
overspread all my faculties. My sense of the place I was in, and even of
the ceremony in which I took part, grew more and more vague and doubtful
every minute. My attention wandered throughout the whole service. I
stammered and made mistakes in uttering the responses. Once or twice
I detected myself in feeling impatient at the slow progress of the
ceremony--it seemed to be doubly, trebly longer than its usual length.
Mixed up with this impression was another, wild and monstrous as if
it had been produced by a dream--an impression that my father had
discovered my secret, and was watching me from some hidden place in
the church; watching through the service, to denounce and abandon me
publicly at the end. This morbid fancy grew and grew on me until the
termination of the ceremony, until we had left the church and returned
to the vestry once more.

The fees were paid; we wrote our names in the books and on the
certificate; the clergyman quietly wished me happiness; the clerk
solemnly imitated him; the pew-opener smiled and curtseyed; Mr. Sherwin
made congratulatory speeches, kissed his daughter, shook hands with me,
frowned a private rebuke at his wife for shedding tears, and, finally,
led the way with Margaret out of the vestry. The rain was still falling,
as they got into the carriage. The fog was still thickening, as I stood
alone under the portico of the church, and tried to realise to myself
that I was married.

_Married!_ The son of the proudest man in England, the inheritor of a
name written on the roll of Battle Abbey, wedded to a linen-draper's
daughter! And what a marriage! What a condition weighed on it! What a
probation was now to follow it! Why had I consented so easily to Mr.
Sherwin's proposals? Would he not have given way, if I had only been
resolute enough to insist on my own conditions?

How useless to inquire! I had made the engagement and must abide by
it--abide by it cheerfully until the year was over, and she was mine
for ever. This must be my all-sufficing thought for the future. No more
reflections on consequences, no mo