“You are sure you are willing?” he asked again, as they reached the garden gate. Jess looked up shyly into the grand face. She would have gone to the other end of the world with him. But she answered only a simple “Yes.” They walked on through the early morning together, side by side, and to the end of her life, ay! and in the years when she understood it better, she remembered her companion’s white face, grave even to sternness, and his preoccupied air. He did not notice the beautiful rosy dawn that flushed the eastern sky directly before them, nor the birds, as they awoke from their nests and went soaring away toward the blue dome that bent above them; nor did he see the flowers lift their sleepy heads and shake the dew from their drowsy eyelids. Jess cast furtive glances at her companion, her heart beating and her every sense tingling deliciously at the thought that she was on her way to be married to the handsome gentleman by her side, from whom she was to be parted nevermore. How different were the thoughts of her companion as they neared their destination, and the moments advanced in which his bonds were to be sealed for life--they seemed irksome beyond the possibility of bearing, and nothing but his strict idea that he was doing his duty restrained him from asking little Jess to release him from the marriage which had been forced upon him by his uncle’s odious will. The people of the village were all astir as they reached it; and when they made their way to the rectory which lay beyond, they found the good man who presided over it out in the little garden which surrounded the parsonage. The handsome stranger who accompanied the young girl made known his errand as briefly as possible, asking if he could perform the marriage ceremony which would make his companion his wife at once. The rector smiled benignly. “As quickly as the words can be uttered, my good sir,” he replied, as he invited them to step inside the house. The little parlor, with its simple, meager furnishings; the tall, handsome man by her side, with almost the ghastliness of death on his face; and the kindly, old minister, book in hand, ever afterward seemed like a weird dream to little Jess. She did not even hear the name her bridegroom uttered in so low a voice, and he saw that she did not; and he promised himself that he would surprise her with the startling truth that he was John Dinsmore on their way home. She heard the words which the minister uttered, and which her companion repeated after him: then she was dimly conscious of repeating the same words--though the name she uttered was John Moore--and then, as the hand of her bridegroom clasped her cold, fluttering fingers, she heard the old minister solemnly say, in a still more far-off hazy voice: “I pronounce you man and wife; and those whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder.”