Monica started and half recoiled as she saw the bridal dress laid out for her adornment, but she was quiet and passive in the hands of her attendants as they arrayed her in her snowy robes, and well she repaid their efforts. Only Lady Diana felt any dissatisfaction.
“Why, child,” she said, impatiently, “you look like a snow maiden. You might be a nun about to take the veil instead of a bride going to her wedding. I have no patience with such pale looks. Randolph will think we have brought him a corpse for his bride.”
Randolph was waiting in the little church on the cliff. His heart beat thick and fast; he himself began to feel as if he were living in a dream. He could not realise that the time had come when he was to call Monica his own.
Lady Diana and Mrs. Pendrill were there, and a friend of his own, young Lord Haddon, who had accompanied him from town the previous day, to play the part of best man at the ceremony. There was a little rustle and little stir outside, and then Monica entered, leaning on Tom Pendrill’s arm, and, without once lifting her eyes, walked steadily up the church, till she stood beside Randolph.
Never, perhaps, had she looked more lovely, yet never, perhaps, more remote and unapproachable, than when she stood before the altar in her bridal robes, to pledge herself for better for worse to the man who loved her, till death should them part.
He looked at her with a strange pang and aching at heart; but the moment was not one when hesitation or drawing back was possible.
In a few more minutes Monica and Randolph Trevlyn were made man and wife.
