“Did he see me?” he asked in a low voice which only Desiree heard.
She glanced at him, and her eyes, which were clear as a cloudless sky, were suddenly shadowed by a suspicion quick and poignant.
“He seemed to see everything, but he only looked at Charles,” she answered. For a moment they all stood in the sunshine looking towards the Langenmarkt where the tower of the Rathhaus rose above the high roofs. The dust raised by the horses' feet and the carriage wheels slowly settled on their bridal clothes.
It was Desiree who at length made a movement to continue their way towards her father's house.
“Well,” she said with a slight laugh, “he was not bidden to my wedding, but he has come all the same.”
Others laughed as they followed her. For a bride at the church-door, or a judge on the bench, or a criminal on the scaffold-steps, need make but a very small joke to cause merriment. Laughter is often nothing but the froth of tears.
There were faces suddenly bleached in the little group of wedding-guests, and none were whiter than the handsome features of Mathilde Sebastian, Desiree's elder sister, who looked angry, had frowned at the children, and seemed to find this simple wedding too bourgeois for her taste. She carried her head with an air that told the world not to expect that she should ever be content to marry in such a humble style, and walk from the church in satin slippers like any daughter of a burgher.
This, at all events, was what old Koch the locksmith must have read in her beautiful, discontented face.
“Ah! ah!” he muttered to the bolts as he shot them. “But it is not the lightest hearts that quit the church in a carriage.”
So simple were the arrangements that bride and bridegroom and wedding-guests had to wait in the street while the servant unlocked the front door of No. 36 with a great key hurriedly extracted from her apron-pocket.