“I am glad that your daughter has married so well.”

“Let me congratulate you, Squire Floyd, on this splendid match.”

“It is not often, Mrs. Floyd, that a mother sees her daughter go forth into the world with such brilliant prospects.”

“You have all that your heart can desire, so far as Delia is concerned, Mrs. Floyd.”

“You are the envy of mothers.”

And so I heard the changes rung on all sides of me, and from the lips of people who might have looked deeper if they had taken the trouble to use their eyes.

To me, the wedding was full of sad suggestions.  It was one of those social self-sacrifices, as common now as then, in which the victim goes self-impelled to the altar, and lays upon its consuming fires the richest dower of womanhood.

I listened to the vows that were made on this occasion, and felt a low thrill of repulsion as words of such solemn import trembled on the air, for too well I knew that a union of souls in a true marriage, such as Delia Floyd might consummate, was impossible here.  Could she be happy in this marriage?  I gave to my own question an emphatic “No!” She might have a gay, brilliant, exciting life; but to that deep peace which is given to loving hearts, and which, in hours of isolation and loneliness, she would desire with an irrepressible longing, she must forever be a stranger.

I looked into her beautiful young face as she stood receiving the congratulations of friends, and felt as I had never felt before on such an occasion.  Instinctively my thought ran questioning along the future.  But no hopeful answer was returned.  How was she to advance in that inner-life development through which the true woman is perfected?  I pushed the question aside.  It was too painful.  Had she been one of the great company of almost soulless women—­if I may use such strong language—­who pass, yearly, through legal forms into the mere semblance of a marriage, I might have looked on with indifference, for then, the realization would, in all probability, be equal to the promise.  But Delia Floyd was of a different spiritual organization.  She had higher capabilities and nobler aspirations; and if the one found no true sphere of development, while the other was doomed to beat its wings vainly amid the lower atmospheres of life, was happiness in the case even a possibility?

Among the guests was Wallingford.  It was six months, almost to a day, since the dearest hope in life he had ever cherished went suddenly out, and left him, for a season, in the darkness of despair.  I did not expect to see him on this occasion; and there was another, I think, who as little anticipated his presence—­I mean the bride.  But he had shared in the invitations, and came up to witness the sacrifice.  To see, what a few months before was to him the most precious thing in life, pass into the full possession of another.  Had not the fine gold grown dim in his eyes?  It had—­dim