CHAPTER LV. THE NIGHT OF MISS JUDSON’S WEDDING. “The night of that wedding was a terrible one to me. Tortured, wild, and filled with unutterable sorrow, I saw the house lighted up from roof to cellar. With my heart aching, and my head hot with pain, I stood by the window in my room listening to each sound, as a man condemned to death hears the tramp of a crowd gathering to the scaffold on which he is to suffer. As each carriage paused at the door, my heart shrunk within my bosom. “I was all alone in the house where our father died. You were absent; I had no human being to comfort me in the great agony of that bereavement, for there are bereavements worse than death, oh! a thousand times worse than death. “I had been all that afternoon walking the streets, in hopes that fatigue might weary out the pain I felt. Sometimes my whole nature rose up in rebellion against fate, and against myself. Why had I kept that long, cowardly silence? I loved the girl a thousand times better than my own life; yet had never told her of it. Held back by sensitive dread, I had allowed another man to take the woman I loved out of my life. Because my poor mother had faults, I had doomed myself to a lonely future. “These harassing thoughts embittered the pain I was suffering. I hated myself for the want of courage that had wrecked my hopes, and left me standing there, the most humiliated and wretched being, I do think, on earth. That moment my imagination was sharpened by pain: I fancied, in my anguish, all that might be passing in that stately dwelling: the bridegroom in his resplendent happiness, all unconscious that his good fortune was rending the hope from another man’s life;—the bride, robed in sumptuous whiteness trembling upon the verge of that abyss, that was to separate us forever—I wondered if she thought of me. All at once a faintness, like that of death, fell upon me; I saw the bride walking past the windows of her chamber; her hand threw aside the curtains, while she looked forth upon the night, her beautiful head crowned with orange-blossoms, and the gossamer veil sweeping downward like the furled wings of a seraph. All excitement left me. I was sad and heart-broken. The sight of her sweet face filled my soul with tender regrets, as if an angel, lost to me forever, had looked serenely down upon me, unconscious of my anguish and lifted forever above it.” The young man paused and wiped the drops of perspiration that even a remembrance of former anguish had brought to his forehead. “I could not stay at the window after those crimson curtains closed upon my love, but went down to the garden, and leaning upon the frail fence by which we had stood so often, wept like a child. Remember, George, how young and inexperienced I was.