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During her wedding ceremony Saturday, Darlene Moriarity leaned over to her husband-to-be, Scott Slota and whispered, “I feel like a shooting star.”

Soon, maybe today or tomorrow, Darlene’s light will dim and die.

But in a touching fulfillment of the 48-year-old Tehachapi woman’s final wish, she forever will be Mrs. Slota.

“He means everything in the world to me,” she said of Slota — a 45-year-old Florida man she met some eight years ago through the Internet.

After being escorted in by her father, Larry Moriarity II, Darlene married Slota wearing a white dress and tiara in front of a small group of weeping friends and family in her living room in Stallion Springs.

Doctors say Darlene will soon succumb to cancer that has metastasized in her liver.

But on Saturday, she was alive. She wept and smiled through the ceremony, blowing kisses to everyone in the room.

She and Slota exchanged rings, and their long kiss brought cries of “Get a room!”

They cut cake, which they fed each other without shenanigans, and took care to spend time with all of their well-wishers.

The Rev. Wayne Meade, chaplain at Hoffmann Hospice, officiated the short ceremony through tears.

“We are very happy in the love that they found in the discovery of each other,” he said. “This bond of marriage, as short as it may be, is still going to be so awesome.”

If it weren’t for the low midwinter sunlight raking its ancient fieldstone walls, the 169-year-old snuff mill — now sitting quietly on a wide bend of the rapid river — just might disappear from view in the dun-colored camouflage of the sycamore and oak trees that surround it.

This is not everyone’s image of the Bronx.

But there it is: the Lorillard snuff mill, on the grounds of the New York Botanical Garden. Not just a civic landmark, it also holds national significance (for better or worse) as an early home of what is now Lorillard Inc., makers of Newport, Kent, True and other cigarettes.

After a half century of service as a cafeteria and a catering hall, the mill is undergoing a $10.5 million restoration and rehabilitation that is decades overdue.

Truth to tell, garden officials would have preferred to start a bit earlier, when the tax-exempt bond market was still intact, or to wait a bit longer. This is not exactly an ideal moment to try to raise more than $5 million to supplement a $5.2 million commitment from the city and the state. However, the garden could not afford further delay that might jeopardize the public financing.

“You concern yourself about that,” the president and chief executive, Gregory Long, said in an interview. “ ‘Jeopardy’ is a strong word. But we wanted to make sure we didn’t.”

Mr. Long added: “It has been our policy not to go ahead with projects that are not fully funded. But the snuff mill is in such bad shape that it was a question of stewardship. Plus, it’s revenue-producing.” Weddings, banquets and parties at the mill, which overlooks a picturesque gorge in the Bronx River, bring in about $1 million annually for the nonprofit botanical garden.

Garden officials plan to reopen the mill in the spring of 2010, with a new kitchen, new bathrooms and a modern elevator. Exterior walls will be repointed. Cedar shingles will be installed on the gabled roof. New offices for the horticultural staff will be built. The architects are Einhorn Yaffee Prescott; Andron Construction is the general contractor.

By installing storm windows behind replicas of the existing multipane windows and taking other conservation measures, garden officials hope the project will qualify for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design status from the United States Green Building Council.

Visitors may not notice, however.

“We’re trying to restore the building to the way it would have appeared in the 19th century,” said Frank Genese, an architect who is the garden’s vice president for capital projects.

That is, plus a bridal changing room or two.

For the mill was not built as a social hall. It was a factory. Here, tobacco was ground into a smokeless, powdery form called snuff, which could be flavored and inhaled. The millstones used in the grinding were powered by two wheels, about 15 feet in diameter, in the basement. These were turned by sluices of water channeled into the building.

No evidence remains of the wheels except for a shallow brick arch over what would have been the southern sluice, or millrace. In the attic, however, where one always finds the most interesting things, the original hoisting mechanism is still in place for a hand-pulled elevator. Its large iron pulley wheel turns easily to this day.

“Isn’t that great?” asked Wayne Cahilly, the resident expert on the mill’s history and construction. “It’s a wonderful piece of workmanship.”

The rehabilitation has revealed the timber framework and joinery methods by which it was assembled. Code numbers were incised into the wooden structural members — in Roman numerals, no less — to ensure that diagonal brace VIII would be inserted into column VIII.

In 1870, the mill was closed. New York City acquired 661 acres of the Lorillard family’s Bronx River estate in 1884. The mill became a carpentry shop for the parks department. In 1915, the agency granted a 140-acre parcel, including the mill, to the botanical garden, which used the old building as a shop and a storehouse.

Then, in the early ’50s, Harriet Barnes Pratt, a member of the botanical garden board, urged that the building be put to public use and offered $88,000 to make it happen. The city, the garden and the Lorillard company together chipped in $211,000 and the Snuff Mill Tea Room was born in 1954.

In the old mill and out on a newly constructed riverside terrace, the cafeteria offered peanut butter and bacon sandwiches for 40 cents, lime rickeys for a quarter and bottles of Schaefer or Ballantine for 30 cents. Food service continued through 2007, though not at those prices.

Some of that atomic-age cuisine may be revived to celebrate the mill’s reopening next year, if you can wait that long for cream cheese on date-nut bread.