"`You come to see your grandchild!--you Amy's grandmother! I don't believe it,' he exclaimed, starting back from her with a look of horror. `You, you wizen-faced, shrivelled old hag!' "`What! you dare to call me names!' screamed the old woman; `you'll repent it--that you will, my master.' "On this, Derick turned to Amy and asked if the old woman spoke the truth. Amy confessed that she was her grandmother, and then burst into tears, which so enraged the dame that she went away muttering curses between her teeth, which Derick could not understand. They had a great effect upon him, and from that time his love for the beautiful gipsy began to cool. I ought to have said that before Derick had fallen in with the poor girl he had been paying his addresses to a young lady of family and fortune who had been captivated by his handsome face and figure. While the above affair had been going on he had neglected his former attentions to this lady, but he now began to resume them. He never told her the reason of his absence, and he made so much play to recover his lost ground, that he was soon reinstated in her good graces. She was not only rich, but handsome and clever, and she so quickly enslaved the heart of Derick, that he neglected poor Amy altogether. He next proposed marriage to her; he was accepted, and the day of the wedding was fixed. "Poor Amy had heard nothing about it, whatever she might have suspected, and she had grown accustomed to his long absences, though her heart was breaking at his coldness. Well, Captain Derick and his beautiful bride went to church to be married, and a very grand wedding it was, and numbers of relations and friends attended. Just as the service began, a alight female figure, wrapped close in a cloak with a hood, was seen to steal into the church, and to hide itself behind one of the pillars which supported the roof. Derick observed the circumstance and changed colour, and his hand trembled as he put the ring on his wife's finger. Just at that moment a piercing scream was heard ringing through the aisles and vaulted roof of the church, and filling the hearts of everybody present with dismay. They searched the church throughout for the stranger in the hooded cloak, they looked around in every direction, but she was nowhere to be found, and no one had seen her quit the church, nor had any one observed her in the neighbourhood. That night there was a fierce storm of thunder and lightning, wind and rain, and on the following morning the young and once beautiful Amy Kirby was found a blackened corpse on the very spot where Ashby Derick had first met her. Some said that she had been killed by lightning, but it was generally supposed that she had died by poison, which she had taken in her despair.