A private parlor had been engaged, and in this the ceremony of
marriage was to take place. This parlor adjoined a chamber, in which
Caroline awaited, with a trembling heart, the issue of events. It
was now, for the first time, as she was about taking the final and
irretrievable step, that her resolution began to fail her. Her
father's anger, the grief of her mother, the unknown state upon
which she was about entering, all came pressing upon her thoughts
with a sense of realization such as she had not known before.
Doubts as to the propriety of what she was about doing, came fast
upon her mind. In the nearness of the approaching event, she could
look upon it stripped of its halo of romance. During the two days
that she had been with Lawson, she had seen him in states of absent
thought, when the true quality of his mind wrote itself out upon his
face so distinctly that even a dim-sighted one could read; and more
than once she had felt an inward shrinking from him that was
irrepressible. Weak and foolish as she was, she was yet pure-minded;
and though in the beginning she did not, because her heart was
overlaid with frivolity, perceive the sphere of his impurity, yet
now, as the moment was near at hand when there was to be a
marriage-conjunction, she began to feel this sphere as something
that suffocated her spirit.
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