‘I don’t know what’s the matter with Miss Beller,’ said the faithful Sally. ‘It’s my belief she has been crying all night. Her eyes are as red as pickled cabbage. All I can say, if she isn’t fond of Mr. Piper she ought to be. I never see such a free-spoken, open-handed gentleman.’ Mr. Piper was intensely popular in the Scratchell household. Nobody considered that Bella was sacrificing herself in marrying so charming a man. His fifty years, his puffiness, his coarse red hands, about which Nature had made a trifling mistake, and supplied thumbs in place of fingers, his bald head with its garnish of iron-gray bristles--all these things went for nothing. He had won everybody’s favour, except perhaps that of his young bride. At a quarter to eleven everybody was ready; Mr. Scratchell in an entire new suit, which circumstance was such a novelty to him that he felt as if he had been changed in his sleep, like the tinker in the old story; Mrs. Scratchell, flushed and nervous, tightly encased in a shining purple silk gown, which made her presence felt as a mass of vivid colour wherever she appeared, like a new stained glass window in an old church. The bridesmaids looked bright and pretty in sky-blue, with wreaths of forget-me-nots round their white chip bonnets. The boys wore sleek broadcloth, like their father’s, buff waistcoats and lavender trousers. Everything was intensely new. They all stood in the hall waiting for the bride, and contemplating each other curiously, like strangers. ‘I never thought father could have come out so good-looking,’ whispered Clementina to her eldest brother. ‘I should hardly have known him.’ ‘Ah!’ ejaculated Herbert, ‘money makes all the difference.’ They felt as if they were all going to be rich now. It was not Bella only who went up in the social scale. Her family ascended with her. Even the faithful domestic drudge, Sally, rejoiced at the change in her fortunes. The fragments that fell to her share after the family dinner would be daintier and more plentiful. Her scanty wages would be more secure. At last Bella came down, in glistening white apparel, clouded over with lace. That delicate taste which had always been hers, the instinctive refinement in all external things which made her mother say that Bella had been a lady from her cradle, had regulated her wedding dress. She looked as pure and aërial as some pale spring floweret, tremulous upon its slender stem. Her family bowed down and worshipped her, like Joseph’s brethren, as represented in the vision of the sheaves. ‘God bless you, my pet!’ cried her father, in an unprecedented burst of affection. ‘It is something to have such a beauty as you in one’s family.’