This bureaucratic decision had something blighting about it; in a few words it contained the whole story.  The hatred of the Portas and the Piombos and their terrible passions were inscribed on this page of the civil law as the annals of a people (contained, it may be, in one word only,—­Napoleon, Robespierre) are engraved on a tombstone.  Ginevra trembled.  Like the dove on the face of the waters, having no place to rest its feet but the ark, so Ginevra could take refuge only in the eyes of Luigi from the cold and dreary waste around her.

The mayor assumed a stern, disapproving air, and his clerk looked up at the couple with malicious curiosity.  No marriage was ever so little festal.  Like other human beings when deprived of their accessories, it became a simple act in itself, great only in thought.

After a few questions, to which the bride and bridegroom responded, and a few words mumbled by the mayor, and after signing the registers, with their witnesses, duly, Luigi and Ginevra were made one.  Then the wedded pair walked back through two lines of joyous relations who did not belong to them, and whose only interest in their marriage was the delay caused to their own wedding by this gloomy bridal.  When, at last, Ginevra found herself in the mayor’s court-yard, under the open sky, a sigh escaped her breast.

“Can a lifetime of devotion and love suffice to prove my gratitude for your courage and tenderness, my Ginevra?” said Luigi.

At these words, said with tears of joy, the bride forgot her sufferings; for she had indeed suffered in presenting herself before the public to obtain a happiness her parents refused to sanction.

“Why should others come between us?” she said with an artlessness of feeling that delighted Luigi.

A sense of accomplished happiness now made the step of the young pair lighter; they saw neither heaven, nor earth, nor houses; they flew, as it were, on wings to the church.  When they reached a dark little chapel in one corner of the building, and stood before a plain undecorated altar, an old priest married them.  There, as in the mayor’s office, two other marriages were taking place, still pursuing them with pomp.  The church, filled with friends and relations, echoed with the roll of carriages, and the hum of beadles, sextons, and priests.  Altars were resplendent with sacramental luxury; the wreaths of orange-flowers that crowned the figures of the Virgin were fresh.  Flowers, incense, gleaming tapers, velvet cushions embroidered with gold, were everywhere.  When the time came to hold above the heads of Luigi and Ginevra the symbol of eternal union,—­that yoke of satin, white, soft, brilliant, light for some, lead for most,—­the priest looked about him in vain for the acolytes whose place it was to perform that joyous function.  Two of the witnesses fulfilled it for them.  The priest addressed a hasty homily to the pair on the perils of life, on the duties they must, some day, inculcate upon their children,—­throwing in, at this point, an indirect reproach to Ginevra on the absence of her parents; then, after uniting them before God, as the mayor had united them before the law, he left the now married couple.