After this, my doubts being all dispelled, I was happy once more, and bade Sergius goodnight with the exulting conviction that henceforth the whole of my life would be spent in his beloved society.
My wedding-morn dawned bright and cloudless, and nothing intervened to prevent my marriage this time. My father came as the sole representative of my family, and explained that Lady Elizabeth had a severe cold which detained her at home. Otherwise she would have come up to town for the wedding. Belle was in London, he said, in answer to my inquiry, doing some shopping, but there was no reference made by either of us as to her absence on the occasion of her sister’s marriage. Jerry had sent me a letter, full of regrets at his own enforced absence, all couched in his own boyish style, and he supplemented these regrets by the promise of a long visit to me at Christmas.
Dear boy! it did me good to read his affectionate chatter.
My father made himself uncommonly agreeable to my friends, and I think that he must have begun to doubt the correctness of his own opinions concerning me, when he saw the esteem in which others held his hitherto despised daughter. He pressed Sergius and myself so cordially to come on a visit to the Grange that I thought it would perhaps be better to bury the hatchet, even though I was inwardly convinced that if my friends had been of low rank, and that if we had been a struggling clerk and his wife, instead of the Count and Countess Volkhoffsky, he would still have preferred our absence to our company.
We were going to Torquay for a short honeymoon, after which we were to settle down in the luxurious home already prepared for our reception. As I changed my bridal gown for the dress in which I was to travel, I contrasted my present bliss with the unhappy time which already seemed to belong to the limbo of a better-to-be-forgotten past, and thanked God that I had won the love of so good and true a man as Sergius.
Sergius had laughingly bidden me to make haste with my toilet, as he was in a fever of impatience to have me to himself, and to feel that he really had secured the object he loved.
I had just as laughingly responded, little thinking of the awful blow that was even then hovering over my head. On going to the drawing-room again I expected to encounter only Sergius and the Prince and Princess Michaelow, for my father had already taken his leave.
But how shall I describe the sudden shock I experienced when I saw that Sergius was absent, and that both my friends wore such a look of commiseration and distress as convinced me that something terrible had again happened to me.
“Where is Sergius? What has happened?” I exclaimed, in sudden panic.
For a moment neither of those whom I questioned spoke. Then the prince came forward, and, clasping both my hands in his, said gently: