CHAPTER XXXV.
THE JOVIAL WEDDING AND RANDOM SHOT.
Two or three mornings after this, I was sent over to the parsonage to spend the day with Cora. Maria took more than usual care in dressing me. I went forth in a white muslin dress, fluttering with rose-colored ribbons, quite too fairy-like for my usual morning visits to this my second home. But Cora was also floating about in clouds of white muslin, with glimpses of azure here and there about her arms and bosom, as if arrayed for some festival. How flowerlike was the style of her loveliness! Those ringlets of glossy gold; the violet eyes full of softness, downcast, and yet so brilliant when she smiled; the rounded arms, the neck and shoulders, white and satiny as when I first saw them by the spring; the little foot and hand, slender and rosy: all these points of beauty are before me this instant, vividly as if painted on canvas. There is a reason why they should have sunk deep into my heart—a cruel reason which the hereafter will disclose.
Her father was in his clerical robes, walking up and down the little parlor gently, as he always moved, and with a soft smile on his lips, as if amusing himself with some odd fancy.
“Come in, my child,” he said, with a change of expression, brought on, I felt, by a more serious current of thought which my appearance suggested. “Come in—you will find Cora in her room.”
I paused, as was my habit, to kiss his hand in passing, but he detained me a moment, pressing his lips upon my forehead.
“God bless you,” he said, “and make you worthy of all that your friends are so willing to suffer in your behalf.”
I went away to Cora’s room. I have told you how very lovely she appeared in her pretty dress, but it is impossible to describe the graceful undulations of each movement, the bewitching softness of her smile! My own olive complexion and deep bloom seemed coarse and rude beside her.
“And so you have come to the wedding,” she said, wreathing her arm around my waist, and drawing me before the little mirror at which she had been dressing. “Isn’t it a droll affair altogether?”
“They are very kind, very good to me,” I replied, a little hurt by her air of ridicule.
“And to me!” was her laughing reply; “this is the very first wedding I shall have seen. Isn’t it charming. The people will be here from Greenhurst; the young heir, perhaps.”