I listened to the vows that were made on this occasion, and felt a low thrill of repulsion as words of such solemn import trembled on the air, for too well I knew that a union of souls in a true marriage, such as Delia Floyd might consummate, was impossible here. Could she be happy in this marriage? I gave to my own question an emphatic “No!” She might have a gay, brilliant, exciting life; but to that deep peace which is given to loving hearts, and which, in hours of isolation and loneliness, she would desire with an irrepressible longing, she must forever be a stranger. I looked into her beautiful young face as she stood receiving the congratulations of friends, and felt as I had never felt before on such an occasion. Instinctively my thought ran questioning along the future. But no hopeful answer was returned. How was she to advance in that inner-life development through which the true woman is perfected? I pushed the question aside. It was too painful. Had she been one of the great company of almost soulless women--if I may use such strong language--who pass, yearly, through legal forms into the mere semblance of a marriage, I might have looked on with indifference, for then, the realization would, in all probability, be equal to the promise. But Delia Floyd was of a different spiritual organization. She had higher capabilities and nobler aspirations; and if the one found no true sphere of development, while the other was doomed to beat its wings vainly amid the lower atmospheres of life, was happiness in the case even a possibility? Among the guests was Wallingford. It was six months, almost to a day, since the dearest hope in life he had ever cherished went suddenly out, and left him, for a season, in the darkness of despair. I did not expect to see him on this occasion; and there was another, I think, who as little anticipated his presence--I mean the bride. But he had shared in the invitations, and came up to witness the sacrifice. To see, what a few months before was to him the most precious thing in life, pass into the full possession of another. Had not the fine gold grown dim in his eyes? It had--dim with the tarnish that better natures receive when they consent to dwell with inferior spirits, and breathe in an atmosphere loaded with earthly exhalations. It would have been the highest delight of his life to have ascended with her into the pure regions, where thought builds tabernacles and establishes its dwelling-places. To have walked onward, side by side, in a dear life companionship, towards the goal of eternal spiritual oneness. But she had willed it otherwise; and now he had come, resolutely, to bear the pain of a final sundering of all bonds, that his soul might free itself from her soul completely and forever.