the lightest hearts that quit the church in a carriage."

So simple were the arrangements that bride and bridegroom and
wedding-guests had to wait in the street while the servant unlocked
the front door of No. 36 with a great key hurriedly extracted from
her apron-pocket.

There was no unusual stir in the street. The windows of one or two
of the houses had been decorated with flowers. These were the
houses of friends. Others were silent and still behind their lace
curtains, where there doubtless lurked peeping and criticizing eyes-
-the house of a neighbour.

The wedding-guests were few in number. Only one of them had a
distinguished air, and he, like the bridegroom, wore the uniform of
France. He was a small man, somewhat brusque in attitude, as became
a soldier of Italy and Egypt. But he had a pleasant smile and that
affability of manner which many learnt in the first years of the
great Republic. He and Mathilde Sebastian never looked at each
other: either an understanding or a misunderstanding.

The host, Antoine Sebastian, played his part well enough when he
remembered that he had a part to play. He listened with a kind
attention to the story of a very old lady, who it seemed had been
married herself, but it was so long ago that the human interest of
it all was lost in a pottle of petty detail which was all she could
recall. Before the story was half finished, Sebastian's attention
had strayed elsewhere, though his spare figure remained in its
attitude of attention and polite forbearance. His mind had, it
would seem, a trick of thus wandering away and leaving his body