Page:The Talisman.pdf/54

106 matrimony. The bright and buoyant month of June, the brightest of all our year, witnessed Charles Smythe's marriage. The bells were yet ringing a joyous peal, softened by the distance into music, as he stood with a folded paper in his hand by a small ebon escritoire. "Why," said he, "should I be weak enough to allow a vain delusion to prey upon my spirits and wear away my health? No doubt being exposed to the open air shrinks up the skin: for three months I will not look at it." He locked the drawer, and turned to meet his beautiful bride, whose light step now entered the room. To use the established phrase, three months of uninterrupted happiness glided away—a phrase, though in frequent use, whose accuracy I greatly doubt; there being no such thing as uninterrupted happiness any how or any where. But one morning, while wandering through the shadowy walks with which his gardens abounded, he heard the voices of his wife and her mother. He looked through the boughs, for one moment, on the fair and young face whose beauty was so precious in his eyes—so precious, for he felt how entirely it was his own. There was something at once womanly and childish in Ellen's love for her husband—womanly in its devotion, childish in its implicit reliance—one of those worshipping, exaggerating, uplooking attachments which it is so satisfactory to man's vanity to inspire. But an expression of strong anxiety was on her face, and her cheek was very pale.