Mr. Vireo officiated; there was something in his method and manner which Mrs. Megilp decidedly objected to.

It was “everyday,” she thought.  “It didn’t give you a feeling of sanctity.  It was just as if he was used to the Almighty, and didn’t mind!  It seemed as if he were just mentioning things, in a quiet way, to somebody who was right at his elbow.  For her part, she liked a little lifting up.”

Hazel Ripwinkley heard her, and told Sylvie and Diana that “that came of having all your ideas of home in the seventh story; of course you wanted an elevator to go up in.”

Desire Ledwith looked what she was, to-day; a grand, pure woman; a fit woman to stand up beside a man like Christopher Kirkbright, in fair white garments, and say the words that made her his wife.  There was a beautiful, sweet majesty in her giving of herself.

She did not disdain rich robes to-day,—­she would give herself at her very best, with all generous and gracious outward sign.

She wore a dress of heavy silk, long-trained; the cream-white folds, unspoiled by any frippery of lace, took, as they dropped around her, the shade and convolutions of a lily.  Upon her bosom, and fastening her veil, were deep green leaves that gave the contrast against which a lily rests itself.  Around her throat were links of frosted silver, from which hung a pure plain silver cross; these were the gift of Hazel.  The veil, of point, and rarely beautiful, fell back from her head,—­lovely in its shape, and the simple wreathing of the dark, soft hair,—­like a drift of water spray; not covering or misting her all over,—­only lending a touch of delicate suggestion to the pure, cool, graceful, flower-like unity of her whole air and apparel.

“Desire is beautiful!” said Hazel Ripwinkley to her mother.  “She never stopped to be pretty!”

White calla-lilies, with their tall stems and great shadowy leaves, were in the Pompeiian vases on the mantel; in the India jars in the corners below; in a large Oriental china bowl that was set upon the closed desk on the library table, wheeled back for the first time that anybody there had seen it so, against the wall.

Hazel had hung a lily-wreath upon the carved back of Uncle Titus’s chair, that no one might sit down in it, and placed it in the recess at Desire’s left hand, as she should stand up to be married.

“Will you two take each other, to love and dwell together, and to do God’s work, as He shall show and help you, so long as He keeps you both in this his world?  Will you, Desire Ledwith, take Christopher Kirkbright to be your wedded husband; will you, Christopher Kirkbright, take Desire Ledwith to be your wedded wife; and do you thereto mutually make your vows in the sight of God and before this company?”

And they answered together, “We do.”

It was a promise for more than each other; it was a life-consecration.  It was a gathering up and renewal of all that had been holy in the resolves of either while they had lived apart; a joining of two souls in the Lord.