For a bride at the church-
door, or a judge on the bench, or a criminal on the scaffold-steps,
need make but a very small joke to cause merriment. Laughter is
often nothing but the froth of tears.
There were faces suddenly bleached in the little group of wedding-
guests, and none were whiter than the handsome features of Mathilde
Sebastian, Desiree's elder sister, who looked angry, had frowned at
the children, and seemed to find this simple wedding too bourgeois
for her taste. She carried her head with an air that told the world
not to expect that she should ever be content to marry in such a
humble style, and walk from the church in satin slippers like any
daughter of a burgher.
This, at all events, was what old Koch the locksmith must have read
in her beautiful, discontented face.
"Ah! ah!" he muttered to the bolts as he shot them. "But it is not
the lightest hearts that quit the church in a carriage."
So simple were the arrangements that bride and bridegroom and
wedding-guests had to wait in the street while the servant unlocked
the front door of No. 36 with a great key hurriedly extracted from
her apron-pocket.
There was no unusual stir in the street. The windows of one or two
of the houses had been decorated with flowers. These were the
houses of friends. Others were silent and still behind their lace
curtains, where there doubtless lurked peeping and criticizing eyes-
-the house of a neighbour.
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