Chapter 18 - Page 2

them were, and, like many other honest men who defeat the effects they
would produce by forced constructions of their principles, he was a little
apt to run into excesses of discipline. But in the present instance, he
was rather pleased than otherwise to see the throng within the reach of
his voice. The occasion was, at best, but semi-official, and he was so far
under the influence of the warm liquors of the côtes as to burn with the
desire of putting forth still more liberally his flowers of eloquence and
his stores of wisdom. He received the inroad, therefore, with an air of
perfect good-humor, a manifestation of assent that encouraged still
greater innovations on the limits until the space occupied by the
principal actors in this closing scene was reduced to the smallest
possible size that was at all compatible with their movements and
comforts. In this situation of things the ceremonies proceeded.

The gentle flow of hope and happiness which was slowly increasing in the
mild bosom of the bride, from the first moment of her appearance in this
unusual scene to that in which it was checked by the cries of Pippo, had
been gradually lessening under a sense of distrust, and she now entered
the square with a secret and mysterious dread at the heart, which her
inexperience and great ignorance of life served fearfully to increase. Her
imagination magnified the causes of alarm into some prepared and designed
insult. Christine, fully aware of the obloquy that pressed upon her race,
had only consented to adopt this unusual mode of changing her condition,
under a sensitive, apprehension that any other would have necessarily led
to the exposure of her origin. This fear, though exaggerated, and indeed
causeless, was the result of too much brooding of late over her own
situation, and of that morbid sensibility in which the most pure and
innocent are, unhappily, the most likely to indulge. The concealment, as
has already been explained, was that of her intended husband, who, with
the subterfuge of an interested spirit, had hoped to mislead the little
circle of his own acquaintances and gratify his cupidity at the cheapest
possible rate to himself. But there is a point of self-abasement beyond
which the perfect consciousness of right rarely permits even the most
timid to proceed. As the bride moved up the lane of human bodies, her eye
grew less disturbed and her step firmer,--for the pride of rectitude
overcame the ordinary girlish sensibilities of her sex, and made her the
steadiest at the very instant that the greater portion of females would
have been the most likely to betray their weakness. She had just attained
this forced but respectable tranquillity, as the bailiff, signing to the
crowd to hush its murmurs and to