Mr. Whitelaw and Mrs. Tadman were at the church when the bailiff and his daughter arrived.  The farmer had made a scarecrow of himself in a new suit of clothes, which he had ordered in honour of this important event, after a great deal of vacillation, and more than one countermand to the Malsham tailor who made the garments.  At the last he was not quite clear in his mind as to whether he wanted the clothes, and the outlay was a serious one.  Mrs. Tadman had need to hold his every-day coat up to the light to convince him that the collar was threadbare, and that the sleeves shone as if purposely polished by some ingenious process.

“Marriage is an expensive thing,” she told him again, with a sigh; “and young girls expect to see a man dressed ever so smart on his wedding-day.”

“I don’t care for her expectations,” Mr. Whitelaw muttered, in reply to this remark; “and if I don’t want the clothes, I won’t have ’em.  Do you think I could get over next Christmas with them as I’ve got?”

Mrs. Tadman said “No” in a most decisive manner.  Perhaps she derived a malicious pleasure from the infliction of that tailor’s bill upon her cousin Whitelaw.  So the new suit had been finally ordered; and Stephen stood arrayed therein before the altar-rails in the gray old church at Crosber, a far more grotesque and outrageous figure to contemplate than any knight templar, or bearded cavalier of the days of the first English James, whose effigies were to be seen in the chancel.  Mrs. Tadman stood a little way behind him, in a merino gown, and a new bonnet, extorted somehow from the reluctant Stephen.  She was full of smiles and cordial greetings for the bride, who did not even see her.  Neither did Ellen Carley see the awkward figure of her bridegroom.  A mist was before her eyes, as if there had been an atmosphere of summer blight or fog in the village church.  She knelt, or rose, as her prayer-book taught her, and went through the solemn service as placidly as if she had been a wondrous piece of mechanism constructed to perform such movements; and then, like a creature in a dream, she found herself walking out of the church presently, with her hand on Stephen Whitelaw’s arm.  She had a faint consciousness of some ceremony in the vestry, where it had taken Stephen a long time to sign his name in the register, and where the clergyman had congratulated him upon his good fortune in having won for himself such a pretty young wife; but it was all more or less like a dreadful oppressive dream.  Mr. Whitelaw’s chaise-cart was waiting for them; and they all four got in, and drove at once to Wyncomb; where there was another ponderous dinner, very much like the banquet of new-year’s-day, and where the bailiff drank freely, after his wont, and grew somewhat uproarious towards tea-time, though Mr. Whitelaw’s selections of port and sherry were not of a kind to tempt a connoisseur.