asked to be present at the wedding service, and among them was Pietro Ghisleri. He had seen English weddings before, but he looked on with some curiosity and with rather mixed feelings of satisfaction and regret. He thought of his own life as he stood there, and for one moment he sincerely wished that he were only awaiting his turn to be dealt with as Arden was, to be taken by the hand, joined to the woman he loved, and turned out upon the world a well-behaved, proper, married man. The next moment he smiled faintly and rather bitterly. Marriage had not been instituted for men like him, thought Ghisleri. If it had been, it would hardly have been so successful an institution as it has proved itself. As for the young couple, he wished them well. Arden was almost the only man for whom he felt any attachment, and he had the most sincere admiration for Laura.
Without feeling anything in the least resembling affection for the lovely English girl, he was conscious that he thought of her very often. Her eyes, which he called holy, and saintly, and sweet, and dark in his rough rhymed impressions of the day, haunted him by night, like the eyes of a sad angel following him in his unblest wanderings through life. Of love for her, he felt not the slightest thrill. His pulse never quickened when she came, nor was he at all depressed by her departure. If he had cared for her in the very least, it must have caused him some little pain to see her married to another before his eyes. Instead, the only passing regret he felt, was that he could not himself stand in some such position as Arden, but by another woman's side. To that other he gave all, as he honestly believed, which he had to give. It was long, too, since the very possibility of loving a young girl had crossed his mind, and since his early youth there had not been anything approaching to the reality of such a love in his life. And yet he knew that he was in some degree under Laura's influence, and in a way in which he was assuredly not under that of the Contessa dell' Armi. The consciousness of this fact annoyed him. There was a good deal of a certain sort of loyalty in his nature, bad as he believed himself to be, and bad as many honest and good people who read this history will undoubtedly say that he was. If such badness could be justified or even excused, it would not be hard to find some reasonable excuses for him, and after all he was probably not worse than a hundred others to be found in the society of every great city. He thought he was worse, sometimes, as he had told Arden, because he himself also thought that he was more fully aware than most men of what he was doing and of the consequences of his deeds. It is most likely, considering his character, that at that time Laura Carlyon represented to him a species of ideal such as he could admire with all his heart at a distance, and so nearly coinciding with his own as to be very often in his thoughts in the place of the one he had so long ago contracted for himself. All this sounds very complicated, while the facts in the case were broadly plain. He appreciated Laura in the highest degree, and did not love her at all. He was sincerely glad that his best if not his only intimate friend should marry her, and when he bid them good-bye he did not feel the smallest twinge of regret except as at a temporary parting from two persons whom he liked.
"You must come and stop with us this summer," said Arden, looking up at him with flushed and happy face. "You know how glad my brother always is to see you. Besides, you are an old friend of my wife's, if any further reasons are necessary. She wants you to come too."
"Of course I do," said Laura, promptly, as she held out her hand.
Strange to say, she had felt far less of that unpleasant, half-timid, half-pained dislike for Ghisleri, since she had grown used to the idea of being Herbert Arden's wife.
And now that her name was really changed, and she was forever bound to her husband, she felt it not at all. It was strange, considering the circumstances, that she should have the certainty that Arden could and would protect her, come what might. The poor little shrunken frame certainly did not suggest the manly strength to shield a woman in danger, which every woman loves to feel. The thin, white hand would have been but a bundle of threads in Ghisleri's strong grip. And yet Laura Arden, as she now was to be called, knew that she would trust her husband to take her part and win against a stronger and a worse man than Ghisleri, should she ever be in need; and, what is more, Ghisleri saw that she did, and his admiration rose still higher. There must be something magnificent in a woman who could so wholly forget such outward frailness and deformity in the man she loved, as to forget also that sometimes in life a man's hand may need that same common brute strength, just to match it against another's, for a woman's dear sake. Such love as that, thought Pietro, must be supremely noble, unselfish, and lasting. Being founded upon no outward illusion, there was no reason why anything should undermine it, nor why the foundation itself should ever crumble away.
That was his view, and, on the whole, it was not an unjust one. For the facts were true. If, when they drove away to the station, Herbert Arden had suddenly, by magic, been clothed in the colossal frame and iron strength of San Giacinto himself, Laura would have felt no safer nor more perfectly shielded and guarded from earthly harm than she really did while she was pulling up the window lest her husband should catch cold even in the mild April air, and lovingly arranging the heavy silk scarf about his neck.
They went southward by common consent, as indeed they did everything. They would go to England later in the year, in June perhaps, when it was warmer. In the meanwhile Arden's brother had offered them his yacht, and they could cruise for a month in the Mediterranean, almost choosing their own climate day by day, and wholly independent of all the manifold annoyances, inconveniences, and positive sufferings which beset the path of young married couples who have not yachts at their disposal. What both most desired was to be alone together, to have enough of each other at last, free from the tiresome daily little crowd of social spectators, and this they could nowhere accomplish so pleasantly and completely as in the luxuriously fitted vessel lent them by Arden's brother. The latter had not seen fit to come to the wedding, but Arden had in no way taken it amiss, though the world had found plenty to say on the subject, and not by any means to Arden's credit. The said brother was a decidedly eccentric person of enormous wealth, who hated anything at all resembling publicity or public ceremony, and was, moreover, a very bad correspondent.
"I am very glad to hear of your engagement, my dear old brother," he wrote. "They say Miss Carlyon is good and beautiful. I have no doubt she is, though I do not at this moment recollect knowing any woman who was both. I have sent the yacht to Naples for you, if you care for a cruise. Keep her as long as you like, and telegraph if you want her sent anywhere else—Nice, for instance, or Venice. Ask your wife to wear the pearls by way of making acquaintance at second hand. They are what I could find. I send a man with them, as they might get lost. Now good-bye, dear boy, enjoy yourself and come to us as soon as you can. Yours ever, Harry.
"P.S. As it is often such a bore to draw money in those funny Italian towns, I enclose a few circular notes which may be useful. Bess and the children are all well and send love and lots of congratulations. I suppose you have written to Uncle Herbert."
The few circular notes thus casually alluded to amounted to two thousand pounds, and it would be unsafe to speculate on the value of the pearls which the messenger brought on his person and delivered safely into Arden's hands. "Harry" was not over-lavish, except where his brother was concerned, and always inwardly regretted that Herbert needed so little and insisted upon living within his modest income. To "give things to Herbert" was one of the few real pleasures he extracted from his great fortune. On the present occasion Arden was glad to accept the money, for he had the very most vague notions of the expense of married life, and had anticipated real economy during his honeymoon, which, of course, could not be quite as pleasant to Laura as having plenty of money to spend. That last little difficulty being removed, he felt that he could give himself up light-hearted to the idyl of perfect love which Laura had brought into his existence.
And forthwith the idyl began, delicate, gentle, lovely as love's life can be where soul and heart are in harmony, heart to soul, while purity teaches innocence what it is to be man and wife.
The harmony was real. Laura and her husband had much in common, intellectually and morally. Not, indeed, that she made any pretence to superior intelligence or extended culture. Even had she possessed very remarkable capabilities,
