In a voice which seemed still more solemn, he pronounced the two before him man and wife.
The bridegroom caught the bride in his arms, and he laughed gayly to see how she trembled in his embrace.
"My wife!" he cried, straining her to his heart. "Sweet," he murmured in a voice just audible to his bride, "to be the lover of the girl you love, is bliss; but to be the husband of the girl you love, is heaven! Tell me, Hildegarde, are you not as happy as I am?"
A low cry broke from the white lips of the girl he held in his arms. The minister had stepped into the parsonage in response to a summons from one of the servants, and invited the newly wedded couple and Miss Fernly to follow him.
He was not surprised that they held back a moment. It seemed to be the custom with all new-married couples to loiter for a moment in the dim shadows of the old church. The critical moment of Miss Fernly's triumph had come. She had done a noble action, she told herself. But somehow she trembled at the thought of what Eugene Mallard would do when he discovered that the girl whom he had wedded was not the beautiful Hildegarde but the cruelly wronged Ida May.
The young husband had drawn his bride beneath the chandelier of the church, and all unmindful of Miss Fernly's presence, he declared, rapturously:
"I must have a kiss from the lips of my wife."
As he spoke he drew aside her veil. One glance at the face it had hidden—oh, so piteous to behold in its awful pallor! and a cry, surely the most bitter that ever broke from human lips, issued from Eugene Mallard's. His arms fell from the supple figure, and he drew back, crying hoarsely:
"You are not Hildegarde! Great God! what does this mean? Who are you?"