Her excess chilled Leam of course, but she held to her promise; and Josephine augured all manner of happy eventualities from the fact that her future step-daughter had yielded so sweetly on the first difference of desire between them, and had let herself be kissed with becoming patience.  It was a good omen for the beginning of things; and all brides are superstitious—­Josephine perhaps more so than most, in that she was more loving and more in love than most.

Yes, it was a pretty wedding, as they all said.  The bride in the regulation white and pearls looked, if not girlish, yet comely and suitable to the bridegroom with his gray hair and sunburnt skin.  The two senior maids had stipulated for a preponderance of warm rose-color in the costumes, which suited every one.  It threw a flush on their faded elderliness which was not amiss, and did the best for them that could be done in the circumstances; it brought out into lovely contrast, the contrast of harmonies, Adelaide Birkett’s delicate complexion, fair flaxen braids and light-blue eyes; it burnt like flame in Leam’s dark hair, and made her large transcendent eyes glow as if with fire; while the little one looked like a rose, the white and crimson petals of which enclosed a laughing golden-headed fairy.

It was admirable all through, and did credit to the generalizing powers of the Hill, which had thus contrived to harmonize the three stages of womanhood and to offend none.  Even Frank’s fastidious taste was satisfied.  So was Mrs. Frank’s, who knew how things ought to be done.  And as she was the rather elderly if very wealthy daughter of a baronet, who considered that she had married decidedly beneath herself in taking Frank Harrowby, the untitled young barrister not even yet in silk, she had come down to the Hill prepared to criticise sharply; so that her approbation carried weight and ensured a large amount of satisfaction.  Edgar, however, who was not so fastidious as his brother, thought the whole thing a failure and that no one looked even tolerable.

As he had his duty to do by his sister, being the father who gave her away, he was fully occupied; but his eyes wandered more than once to the younger two of the bridesmaids proper—­those two irreconcilables joined for the first time in a show of sisterhood and likeness—­and whom he examined and compared as so often before, with the same inability to decide which.

He paid little or no attention to either.  He might have been a gray-headed old sage for the marvelous reticence of his demeanor, devoting himself to his duties and the dowagers with a persistency of good-breeding, to say the least of it, admirable.  At the breakfast-table he was naturally separated from both these fair disturbers of his lordly peace, Leam having been told off to Alick, and Adelaide handed over to Frank’s fraternal care, with Mrs. Frank, who claimed more than a fee-simple in her husband, watching them jealously and interrupting them often.