Anderson, watching, saw presently, the bridal party emerge from the church.  To his fancy, which naturally looked for similes to his beloved pursuits of life, he saw the bride like a white moth of the night, her misty veil, pendant from her head to her feet, carrying out the pale, slanting evanescence of the moth’s wings.  She moved with a slight wavering motion suggestive of the flight of the vague winged thing which flits from darkness to darkness when it does not perish in the candle beams.  This moth, to Anderson, was doing the latter, fluttering possibly to her death, in the light of that awful primaeval force of love upon which the continuance of creation hangs.  Again, a great pity for her overwhelmed him, and a very fierceness of protection seized him at the sight of Charlotte following her sister in her bridesmaid’s attire of filmy white over rose, with pink roses in her hair.

Anderson stood where he could see the faces of the bridal party quite plainly in the glare of the electric light.  Charlotte, he saw, with emotion, had an awed, intensely sober expression on her charming face, but the bride’s, set in the white mist of her thrown-back veil, was smiling lightly.  He saw Arms bend over and whisper to her, and she laughed outright with girlish gayety.  Anderson wondered what he said.  Arms had smiled, yet his face was evidently moved.  What he had said was simple enough:  “Fighting Indians is nothing to getting married, honey.”

Ina laughed, but her husband’s lips quivered a little.  She herself realized a curious self-possession greater than she had ever realized in her whole life.  It is possible that the world is so old and so many women have married in it that a heredity of self-control supports them in the midst of an occasion which has quickened their pulses in anticipation during their whole lives.  But the bridegroom was not so supported.  He was manifestly agitated and nervous, especially during the reception which followed the ceremony.  He stood with forced amiability responding to the stilted congratulations and gazing with wondering admiration at his bride, whose manner was the perfection of grace.

“Lord, old man!” he whispered once to Carroll, “this part of it is a farce for an old fellow like me, standing in a blooming bower, being patted on the head like a little poodle-dog.”

Carroll laughed.

“She likes it, now,” whispered Arms, with a fond, proud glance at Ina.

“Women all do,” responded Carroll.

“Well, I’d stand here a week if she wanted to, bless her,” Arms whispered back, and turned with a successful grimace to acknowledge Mrs. Van Dorn’s carefully worded congratulations.  As she turned away she met Carroll’s eyes, and a burning blush overspread her face to her pompadour crest surmounting her large, middle-aged face.  She suddenly recalled, with painful acuteness, the only other occasion on which she had been in the house; but Carroll’s manner was perfect, there was in his eyes no recollection whatever.