As I sit here, this bright autumnal morning, and from the window of my room look out upon the river winding its way to the sea, there falls upon my ears the merry chime of bells from the tower of the old gray church,—wedding-bells they are,—and their echoes float across the water, and up the mountain side, and then die away among the wooded cliffs beyond, where the foliage has just been touched with the October frost, and has here and there a gay trimming of scarlet and gold on its summer dress of green. There is a wedding at St. Luke’s to-day, and the bridal party is passing now, and I kiss my hand to the beautiful bride, who flashes a smile at me from those wonderful eyes of hers,—eyes so like in expression to those of the elder lady who sits beside her, and but for whom that wedding at St. Luke’s would never have been. They are gone now from my sight, and only the pealing of the bells is heard in the quiet street, and as I muse upon the strange event which has made the people of our town wild with excitement and curiosity, and of which I, perhaps, know quite as much as any one, I ask myself, “Why not write out the story, suppressing names, and dates, and localities, and give it to the world, as a proof that real life is sometimes stranger than fiction.” And so, just as the sound of the marriage-bells dies away among the distant hills, I take my pen to begin a tale which will have in it no part of my own life, save as it was sometimes interwoven with the lives of those whose history I write. _I_ am only Esther Armstrong, the village schoolmistress, a plain, old-fashioned woman of thirty-five, with no incident whatever in my life worth recording; and so, with no thought that any one will accuse me of egotism or conceit, I write down CHAPTER I., AND CALL IT ABELARD. The Schuylers were of Holland descent, and had married and intermarried in England and America, and had in their family a title, it was said, and they boasted of their Dutch blood, and English blood, and American blood, and, like the famous Miss McBride, “were proud of their money and proud of their pride,” and proud to be known as “the Schuylers of New York,” who had for so many years kept themselves free from anything approaching to plebeianism, and whose wealth and importance had been steadily on the increase since the first English Schuyler left his ancestral halls in Lincolnshire across the sea. But the race was gradually dying out, and the only male member of the direct line in America was Colonel Howard, a proud, reticent man, who, a few years before my story opens, had married Miss Emily Rossiter, a lady fully up to the Schuyler standard of moral and social worth.