The service was followed by the conventional wedding-breakfast; the congratulations of friends, and the rattling away of the bridal-carriage to the “hurrahing” of the servants and the villagers; and the tin-tin-tabula of the wedding-peals.  Before four o’clock the last guest had departed, and the squire stood with his wife and Charlotte weary and disconsolate amid the remains of the feast and the dying flowers; all of them distinctly sensitive to that mournful air which accomplished pleasures leave behind them.

The squire could say nothing to dispel it.  He took his rod as an excuse for solitude, and went off to the fells.  Mrs. Sandal was crying with exhaustion, and was easily persuaded to go to her room, and sleep.  Then Charlotte called the servants, men and women, and removed every trace of the ceremony, and all that was unusual or extravagant.  She set the simplest of meals; she managed in some way, without a word, to give the worried squire the assurance that all the folly and waste and hurryment were over for ever; and that his life was to fall back into a calm, regular, economical groove.

He drank his tea and smoked his pipe to this sense, and was happier than he had been for many a week.

“It is a middling good thing, Alice,” he said, “that we have only one more daughter to marry.  I should think a matter of three or four would ruin or kill a man, let alone a mother.  Eh?  What?”

“That is the blessed truth, William.  And yet it is the pride of my heart to say that there never was such a bride or such a bridal in Sandal-Side before.  Still, I am tired, and I feel just as if I had had a trouble.  Come day, go day; at the long end, life is no better than the preacher called it—­vanity.”

“To be sure it is not.  We laugh at a wedding, we cry at a burying, a christening brings us a feast.  On the Sabbath we say our litany; and as for the rest of the year, one day marrows another.”

“Well, well, William Sandal!  Maybe we will both feel better after a night’s sleep.  To-morrow is untouched.”

And the squire, looking into her pale, placid face, had not the heart to speak out his thought, which was, “Nay, nay; we have mortgaged to-morrow.  Debt and fear, and the penalties of over-work and over-eating and over-feeling, will be dogging us for their dues by dayshine.”

CHAPTER VIII.

THE ENEMY IN THE HOUSEHOLD.

     “There is a method in man’s wickedness,
      It grows up by degrees.”

     “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is
      To have a thankless child!”

After the wedding, there were some weeks of that peaceful monotony which is the happiest vehicle for daily life,—­weeks so uniform that Charlotte remembered their events as little as she did their particular weather.  The only circumstance that cast any shadow over them related to Harry.  His behavior had been somewhat remarkable, and the hope that time would explain it had not been realized at the end of August.