But, though the clergyman might have given his moral even a keener point, he did not fail to despatch an attendant to inquire into the mystery and stop those sounds so dismally appropriate to such a marriage.  A brief space elapsed, during which the silence was broken only by whispers and a few suppressed titterings among the wedding-party and the spectators, who after the first shock were disposed to draw an ill-natured merriment from the affair.  The young have less charity for aged follies than the old for those of youth.  The widow’s glance was observed to wander for an instant toward a window of the church, as if searching for the time-worn marble that she had dedicated to her first husband; then her eyelids dropped over their faded orbs and her thoughts were drawn irresistibly to another grave.  Two buried men with a voice at her ear and a cry afar off were calling her to lie down beside them.  Perhaps, with momentary truth of feeling, she thought how much happier had been her fate if, after years of bliss, the bell were now tolling for her funeral and she were followed to the grave by the old affection of her earliest lover, long her husband.  But why had she returned to him when their cold hearts shrank from each other’s embrace?

Still the death-bell tolled so mournfully that the sunshine seemed to fade in the air.  A whisper, communicated from those who stood nearest the windows, now spread through the church:  a hearse with a train of several coaches was creeping along the street, conveying some dead man to the churchyard, while the bride awaited a living one at the altar.  Immediately after, the footsteps of the bridegroom and his friends were heard at the door.  The widow looked down the aisle and clenched the arm of one of her bridemaids in her bony hand with such unconscious violence that the fair girl trembled.

“You frighten me, my dear madam,” cried she.  “For heaven’s sake, what is the matter?”

“Nothing, my dear—­nothing,” said the widow; then, whispering close to her ear, “There is a foolish fancy that I cannot get rid of.  I am expecting my bridegroom to come into the church with my two first husbands for groomsmen.”

“Look! look!” screamed the bridemaid.  “What is here?  The funeral!”

As she spoke a dark procession paced into the church.  First came an old man and woman, like chief mourners at a funeral, attired from head to foot in the deepest black, all but their pale features and hoary hair, he leaning on a staff and supporting her decrepit form with his nerveless arm.  Behind appeared another and another pair, as aged, as black and mournful as the first.  As they drew near the widow recognized in every face some trait of former friends long forgotten, but now returning as if from their old graves to warn her to prepare a shroud, or, with purpose almost as unwelcome, to exhibit their wrinkles and infirmity and claim her as their companion by the tokens of her own decay.  Many a merry night had she danced with them in youth, and now in joyless age she felt that some withered partner should request her hand and all unite in a dance of death to the music of the funeral-bell.