With those words, he opened the sitting-room door, introduced Noel Vanstone to Magdalen’s presence, bowed himself out of the room again, and set forth alone to while away the rest of the afternoon by taking a walk.  His face showed plain tokens of anxiety, and his party-colored eyes looked hither and thither distrustfully, as he sauntered along the shore.  “The time hangs heavy on our hands,” thought the captain.  “I wish to-morrow was come and gone.”

The day passed and nothing happened; the evening and the night followed, placidly and uneventfully.  Monday came, a cloudless, lovely day; Monday confirmed the captain’s assertion that the marriage was a certainty.  Toward ten o’clock, the clerk, ascending the church steps quoted the old proverb to the pew-opener, meeting him under the porch:  “Happy the bride on whom the sun shines!”

In a quarter of an hour more the wedding-party was in the vestry, and the clergyman led the way to the altar.  Carefully as the secret of the marriage had been kept, the opening of the church in the morning had been enough to betray it.  A small congregation, almost entirely composed of women, were scattered here and there among the pews.  Kirke’s sister and her children were staying with a friend at Aldborough, and Kirke’s sister was one of the congregation.

As the wedding-party entered the church, the haunting terror of Mrs. Lecount spread from Noel Vanstone to the captain.  For the first few minutes, the eyes of both of them looked among the women in the pews with the same searching scrutiny, and looked away again with the same sense of relief.  The clergyman noticed that look, and investigated the License more closely than usual.  The clerk began to doubt privately whether the old proverb about the bride was a proverb to be always depended on.  The female members of the congregation murmured among themselves at the inexcusable disregard of appearances implied in the bride’s dress.  Kirke’s sister whispered venomously in her friend’s ear, “Thank God for to-day for Robert’s sake.”  Mrs. Wragge cried silently, with the dread of some threatening calamity she knew not what.  The one person present who remained outwardly undisturbed was Magdalen herself.  She stood, with tearless resignation, in her place before the altar—­stood, as if all the sources of human emotion were frozen up within her.

The clergyman opened the Book.

* * * * *

It was done.  The awful words which speak from earth to Heaven were pronounced.  The children of the two dead brothers—­inheritors of the implacable enmity which had parted their parents—­were Man and Wife.