The Beloved Stranger - By Grace Livingston Hill Page 0,11
first stately measures! Yes, there was the huddle of rainbow-colored dresses that were the bridesmaids. How glad she was that none of them were really intimate friends. All of them new friends from Aunt Pat’s circle of acquaintances. Her own girlhood friends were all too poor or too far away to be summoned. The first of them, the pink ones, were stepping forward now, slowly differentiating themselves from the mass of color, beginning the procession with measured, stilled tread; and back in the far dimness of the hall, silhouetted against the darkness of the out-of-doors, she could see the mist of whiteness that must be the bride, with the tall dark cousin beside her. Yes, the bride had come. Sherrill’s secret fear that she might somehow lose her nerve and escape on the way to the church was unfounded. This girl really wanted Carter enough to go through this awful ordeal to get him! Besides, a girl couldn’t very well run away and hope to escape detection in a bridal gown. Sherrill felt a hysterical laugh coming to her lips that changed into a quiver of tears, and a little shiver that ran down her back. And then suddenly she felt that strong arm again just under her elbow, supporting her, just as her knees began to manifest a tendency to crumple under her.
“Oh, thank you!” she breathed softly, letting her weight rest on his arm. “I’m—a little—nervous—I guess!”
“You aren’t fit to stand!” he whispered. “I wonder if I couldn’t find you a chair down there in the back room?”
She shook her head.
“It wouldn’t be worthwhile,” she answered, “the ceremony will soon be over. You are very kind, but I’ll be all right.”
He adjusted his arm so it would better support her, and somehow it helped and calmed her to feel him standing there. She had no idea how he looked or who he was. She hadn’t really looked at him. She just knew he was kind, and that he was a stranger who didn’t know a thing about her awful predicament. If he had been a friend who knew, she couldn’t have stood with him there. But it was like being alone with herself to have him staying there so comfortingly. After it was over she would never likely see him again. She hoped he would never know who she was nor anything about it. She hadn’t really thought anything about him as a personality. He was just something by the way to lean upon in her extremity.
The pink bridesmaids were halfway up the middle aisle now, the green at the formal distance behind, the violet just entering past the first rank of seats with the blue waiting behind. Their faces wore the set smile of robots endeavoring to do their best to keep the step. There was no evidence so far that either the wedding party or the audience had discovered anything unusual about this wedding or unexpected about the bride. She suddenly gasped at the thought of the gigantic fraud that she was about to perpetrate. Had she a right to do this? But it was too late to think about that now.
Sherrill’s eyes went back to the bridegroom standing there waiting, his immaculate back as straight and conventional as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred a half hour before. She remembered with a stab of pain the powder that he had brushed from his left lapel. Was there any trace of it left? She had a sudden sick faint feeling as if she would like to lay her head down and close her eyes. She reeled just a tiny bit, and the young man by her side shifted his arms, putting the right one unobtrusively about her so that he could better steady her, and putting his left hand across to support her elbow. She cast him a brief little flicker of a smile of gratitude, but her eyes went swiftly back to the slow procession that was advancing up the aisle, so slow it seemed to her like the march of the centuries.
The bride was standing in the doorway now, just behind the yellow-clad maid of honor, her hand lying on the arm of the distant cousin, her train adjusted perfectly; no sign on the face of the maid of honor that she had noticed it was the wrong bride whom she had just prepared for her appearance. They didn’t know it yet! Nobody knew what was about to happen except herself! The