Dimly and queerly, the feeling that prompted the half-laughing protest returned upon him to-night. The solemn radiance overflooding her eyes and clearing into exalted beauty lineaments critics pronounced irregular, positively awed him—an uncommon and not altogether agreeable sensation for a bridegroom, especially one of his practical and somewhat dogmatic cast of mind. Rebel though romantic lovers may at what they consider derogatory to the constancy and depth of wedded affection, it is not to be denied that the turn of the bridal pair from the altar symbolizes a reversal in their mutual relation. The bonds that have held the lover in vassalage—very sweet bondage, perhaps, but still not liberty—are with the utterance of the nuptial benediction transferred to the woman he holds by the hand. Barton Ashe was very much in love, but he was a very man. His wife was now his property. “I feel a wild desire to put my arms around you to keep your wings from unfurling,” he found occasion to whisper presently. “I suppose these people would think me insane if I were to yield to the impulse and tell them why I did it.” The luminous eyes laughed joyously into his. With all her intellect and passionate depth of feeling, she had seasons of childlike glee that became her rarely. “As you would be. I was never farther from ‘wanting to be an angel’ than at this instant. The life that now is appears to me eminently satisfactory.” A fresh bevy of congratulatory guests interrupted the hasty “aside.” “We find it hard to forgive you, Mr. Ashe,” twittered an overdressed, overcolored, and overmannered spinster. “How can you reconcile it to your conscience to change a broad, beneficent river into a canal to serve your own particular mill? I shall not congratulate you upon a private good which is a public disaster.” “Many others are thinking the same thing, but they cannot express it so beautifully,” said a plaintive matron, one of the many whose perfunctory sighs at weddings are the reverse of complimentary to their bonded partners. “But we must be thankful you have been spared so long to make us happy and do so much good in the world.” “I am puzzled,” Barton observed, looking from one to the other. “If I were taking her out of town, to Coromandel, we will say, or even to New Jersey, there might be occasion for outcry.”