she would desire with an irrepressible longing, she must forever be a
stranger.

I looked into her beautiful young face as she stood receiving the
congratulations of friends, and felt as I had never felt before on such
an occasion. Instinctively my thought ran questioning along the future.
But no hopeful answer was returned. How was she to advance in that
inner-life development through which the true woman is perfected? I
pushed the question aside. It was too painful. Had she been one of
the great company of almost soulless women--if I may use such strong
language--who pass, yearly, through legal forms into the mere semblance
of a marriage, I might have looked on with indifference, for then, the
realization would, in all probability, be equal to the promise. But
Delia Floyd was of a different spiritual organization. She had higher
capabilities and nobler aspirations; and if the one found no true sphere
of development, while the other was doomed to beat its wings vainly
amid the lower atmospheres of life, was happiness in the case even a
possibility?

Among the guests was Wallingford. It was six months, almost to a day,
since the dearest hope in life he had ever cherished went suddenly out,
and left him, for a season, in the darkness of despair. I did not expect
to see him on this occasion; and there was another, I think, who as
little anticipated his presence--I mean the bride. But he had shared in
the invitations, and came up to witness the sacrifice. To see, what a
few months before was to him the most precious thing in life, pass into
the full possession of another. Had not the fine gold grown dim in his
eyes? It had--dim with the tarnish that better natures receive when they
consent to dwell with inferior spirits, and breathe in an atmosphere
loaded with earthly exhalations. It would have been the highest delight
of his life to have ascended with her into the pure regions, where
thought builds tabernacles and establishes its dwelling-places. To have
walked onward, side by side, in a dear life companionship, towards the
goal of eternal spiritual oneness. But she had willed it otherwise; and
now he had come, resolutely, to bear the pain of a final sundering of
all bonds, that his soul might free itself from her soul completely and
forever.

I first noticed him as the bridal party entered the room, and took their
places in front of the clergyman who was to officiate on the occasion.
He occupied a position that gave