most matters, the widow was perhaps the more amiable for the one
frailty that made her ridiculous. Being childless, she could not
remain beautiful by proxy in the person of a daughter; she therefore
refused to grow old and ugly on any consideration; she struggled with
Time, and held fast her roses in spite of him, till the venerable
thief appeared to have relinquished the spoil as not worth the trouble
of acquiring it.

The approaching marriage of this woman of the world with such an
unworldly man as Mr. Ellenwood was announced soon after Mrs. Dabney's
return to her native city. Superficial observers, and deeper ones,
seemed to concur in supposing that the lady must have borne no
inactive part in arranging the affair; there were considerations of
expediency which she would be far more likely to appreciate than Mr.
Ellenwood, and there was just the specious phantom of sentiment and
romance in this late union of two early lovers which sometimes makes a
fool of a woman who has lost her true feelings among the accidents of
life. All the wonder was how the gentleman, with his lack of worldly
wisdom and agonizing consciousness of ridicule, could have been
induced to take a measure at once so prudent and so laughable. But
while people talked the wedding-day arrived. The ceremony was to be
solemnized according to the Episcopalian forms and in open church,
with a degree of publicity that attracted many spectators, who
occupied the front seats of the galleries and the pews near the altar
and along the broad aisle. It had been arranged, or possibly it was
the custom of the day, that the parties should proceed separately to
church. By some accident the bridegroom was a little less punctual
than the widow and her bridal attendants, with whose arrival, after
this tedious but necessary preface, the action of our tale may be said
to commence.