IN little more than a month after that meeting on the hill--on a rimy morning in departing November--Adam and Dinah were married.
There were three other couples, following the bride and bridegroom: first, Martin Poyser, looking as cheery as a bright fire on this rimy morning, led quiet Mary Burge, the bridesmaid; then came Seth serenely happy, with Mrs.
Rimy gave a grin, Mercier a sigh and seemed about to speak...but, meeting Gabriel's eye, said nothing.
I smell the fog that hung about the place; I see the hoar frost, ghostly, through it; I feel my
rimy hair fall clammy on my cheek; I look along the dim perspective of the schoolroom, with a sputtering candle here and there to light up the foggy morning, and the breath of the boys wreathing and smoking in the raw cold as they blow upon their fingers, and tap their feet upon the floor.
He thought of the times he had seen the brother and sister together in deep converse over one of his own old college books; now, in the
rimy mornings, when he made those sharpening pilgrimages to Cloisterham Weir; now, in the sombre evenings, when he faced the wind at sunset, having climbed his favourite outlook, a beetling fragment of monastery ruin; and the two studious figures passed below him along the margin of the river, in which the town fires and lights already shone, making the landscape bleaker.
When she had dressed herself with much shuddering and chattering, they allayed their internal discomfort by a slender meal of biscuits, got their skates, and went out across the
rimy meadows, past patient cows breathing clouds of steam, to Wickens's pond.