The important day arrived. Followed by her lovely companions, herself the most lovely, Elizabeth with trembling steps and a fluttering heart approached the altar, where Henry of Montfort waited her arrival. Ida now stepped forward; she threw back her veil, and prepared to fasten the wreath of Innocence among the golden ringlets of her friend: a similar garland hung on her arm, with which she was afterwards to present the bridegroom. Occupied entirely with the task of decorating Elizabeth, she had not yet cast her eyes on young Montfort; she had not observed, that he started on beholding her; she had not heard the name of “_Rosanna_,” which escaped from his trembling lips. She now turned to him for the purpose of offering him the other wreath; she already extended her hand; when fixing her eyes on his countenance, she uttered a cry expressive at once of the utmost surprise and terror, attempted but in vain to pronounce the name of Erwin Melthal, and would have sank upon the ground, had not Constantia rushed forward and received her in her supporting arms. Constantia still wore the habit of a Nun; the altar was adorned exactly in the same manner, and the blazing lamps shed the same mysterious light along the fretted roots and gloomy arches, as on that day when Erwin and Rosanna knelt at the shrine of St. Engeltruda, poured forth the most solemn vows of eternal fidelity, and heard Constantia devote the breaker of those vows to unceasing shame and sorrow.—Erwin Melthal (or rather Henry of Montfort, for alas! they formed but one) had long believed the lovely Sisters to be no more the inhabitants of earth: Constantia on the other hand was in the same error respecting Erwin. The sudden appearance of one, whom she had long since numbered with the dead, imprest upon her countenance something of that serious, that strangely awful expression, which struck him so forcibly, when she united his hand with Rosanna’s in the Chapel of Engelberg. He recollected her words—“Should either of you rend asunder the bonds, with which I now unite your fates for ever, that instant shall my form (be I living, or be I dead) stand before you threatening and awful, to reproach you with your crimes.”—These recollections, and the unexpected appearance of the Sisters, at the very moment when he was on the point of giving his hand to another, made him consider the whole scene as a supernatural vision! He believed, that the forms which stood before him, were creatures of another world; his brain was unable to support the shock; the surrounding objects floated before his eyes, his senses forsook him, and he sank without animation at the feet of his astonished bride. END OF THE THIRD VOLUME. PRINTED BY D. N. SHURY, BERWICK-STREET, SOHO. ------------------------------------------------------------------------