groaned the heartstricken bride . `` Cruel ? '' repeated he ; then , losing his deathlike composure in a wild bitterness , `` Heaven judge which of us has been cruel to the other ! In youth you deprived me of my happiness , my hopes , my aims ; you took away all the substance of my life and made it a dream without reality enough even to grieve at -- with only a pervading gloom , through which I walked wearily and cared not whither . But after forty years , when I have built my tomb and would not give up the thought of resting there -- no , not for such a life as we once pictured -- you call me to the altar . At your summons I am here . But other husbands have enjoyed your youth , your beauty , your warmth of heart and all that could be termed your life . What is there for me but your decay and death ? And therefore I have bidden these funeral-friends , and bespoken the sexton 's deepest knell , and am come in my shroud to wed you as with a burial-service , that we may join our hands at the door of the sepulchre and enter it together . '' It was not frenzy , it was not merely the drunkenness of strong emotion in a heart unused to it , that now wrought upon the bride . The stern lesson of the day had done its work ; her worldliness was gone . She seized the bridegroom 's hand . `` Yes ! '' cried she ; `` let us wed even at the door of the sepulchre . My life is gone in vanity and emptiness , but at its close there is one true feeling . It has made me what I was in youth : it makes me worthy of you . Time is no more for both of us . Let us wed for eternity . '' With a long and deep regard the bridegroom looked into her eyes , while a tear was gathering in his own . How strange that gush of human feeling from the frozen bosom of a corpse !
He wiped away the tear , even with his XXXXX .
burial-service eyes funeral-friends knell sepulchre shroud whither worldliness years youth