Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/147



HAT a lovely looking bride was Rhoda Fielding ! What a spring-like aspect she had ! What an embodiment of bloom and freshness she seemed! That round, smooth face, tinted like an apple blossom, that furrowless brow, (somewhat too low and narrow, but redeemed by rich clusters of chestnut curls,) those cloudless eyes and velvety lips, theirs was the beauty of untried youth ; beauté du diable, as it is too expressively called by the French. Then Rhoda was so artless, so frank-hearted, so unsophisticated! just what Edmund Fielding most admired in woman- hood. Charmed by the glittering surface of the stream it was but natural that he never dived be- neath, to note what shells, or pebbles, lay within its channel, ready to be cast up by the surging tide of matrimony. He had yearned for the first, pure, uncalculating affection of a guileless maiden, and that he had won. A man of cultivated mind and highly intellectual tastes, he expected to find in his youthful wife a plastic, genial and appreciating companion ; but whether Rhoda's mental attributes,