This allusion was to the marriage of Jonas, which was to take place that very evening at the castle.  Mrs. Anderson had refused to have “such wicked nonsense” at her house, and as Cynthy had no home, Andrew had appointed it at the castle, partly to oblige Jonas, partly from habitual opposition to Abigail, but chiefly to express his contempt for Adventism.

Mrs. Anderson herself was in a state of complete sublimation.  She had sent for Norman, that she might get him ready for the final judgment, and Norman, without the slightest inclination to be genuinely religious, was yet a coward, and made a provisional repentance, not meant to hold good if Elder Hankins’s figures should fail; just such a repentance as many a man has made on what he supposed to be his death-bed.  Do not I remember a panic-stricken man, converted by typhoid fever and myself, who laughed as soon as he began to eat gruel, to think that he had been “such a fool as to send for the preacher”?

Now, between Mrs. Anderson’s joy at Norman’s conversion, and her delight that the world would soon be at an end and she on the winning side, and her anticipation of the pleasure she would feel even in heaven in saying, “I told you so!” to her unbelieving friends, she quite forgot Julia.  In fact she went from one fit of religious catalepsy to another, falling into trances, or being struck down with what was mysteriously called “the power.”  She had relaxed her vigilance about Julia, for there were but three more hours of time, and she felt that the goal was already gained, and she had carried her point to the very last.  A satisfaction for a saint!

The neglected Julia naturally floated toward the outer edge of the surging crowd, and she and August inevitably drifted together.

“Let us go and see Jonas married,” said August.  “It is no harm.  God can take us to heaven from one place as well as another, if we are His children.”

In truth, Julia was wearied and bewildered, not to say disgusted, with her mother’s peculiar religious exercises, and she gladly escaped with August to the castle and the wedding of her faithful friends.

Andrew, in a spirit of skeptical defiance, had made his castle look as flowery and festive as possible.  The wedding took place in the lower story, but the library was illuminated, and the Adventists who had occasion to pass by Andrew’s on their way to the rendezvous accepted this as a new fulfillment of prophecy to the very letter.  They nodded one to another, and said, “See! marrying and giving in marriage, as in the days of Noah!”

August and Julia were too much awe-stricken to say much on their way to the castle.  But in these last hours of a world grown old and ready for its doom, they cleaved closer together.  There could be neither heaven nor millennium for one of them without the other!  Loving one another made them love God the more, and love cast out all fear.  If this was the Last, they would face it together, and if it proved the Beginning, they would rejoice together.  At sight of every shooting meteor, Julia clung almost convulsively to August.