Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/50

42 singularly severe for one so young, and not the eldest of the family. Power, heart, conscience, and judgment have all sufficed for her needs, and for those of her parents, in their hour of dependence upon her. Therefore it is that when we have said, “Poor Prince Louis! how very hard are these disappointments for him!” we have added, “But they show him what a treasure it is that he is waiting for.”

And now the waiting is over. There were anxieties and doubts to the last, from the visitations of sickness and death on every side. Whatever might have happened, everybody hoped that the young people would be sanctioned in making their grave and simple marriage; and now that it is done, they will be at rest in each other—strong enough to bear, or free to enjoy, whatever may betide in that human fate of whose uncertainty they have had such strong admonition. They have all the world for well-wishers; and they are really making a whole people happy (and perhaps the oldest most) by the proof that a Royal marriage may be as natural and single-hearted, and therefore as holy and as safe, as any in that temperate zone of social life in which all natural ordinances are supposed to work most perfectly. The nation’s blessing is upon them.

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