“Feeling sure that you love me, because you told me so once, although I do not love you yet more than others, I will be your wife and try to love you more, if only you will take me far away from this place at once and forever, David! If you ever cared for me, stop to ask no questions; but do as I ask you, and you shall have my hand and all that I possess!” she breathed hardly, looking over her shoulder at intervals, with a nervous, expectant, terrified manner. “Miss de la Vera, it is you who are mad now!” he replied, in a tone of ineffable sadness and longing, as he gazed on her with something like consternation. And well he might! The situation was astounding! Here was this young girl, Gloria de la Vera, the daintiest beauty, the wealthiest heiress in the country, proposing to marry HIM, the poor young fisherman attached to the estate! It was wonderful, unprecedented, incredible! Why, half the young men in the community were mad to get her. A smile of hers would have brought the best of them to her feet. And yet she came to give her hand and her fortune to this poor, unlearned young fisherman! “Nothing, nothing but temporary insanity could have betrayed her into such a reckless proposal,” said the young fisherman to himself. Yet the girl who stood there before him, calm, pale, and steadfast as a marble statue, was not insane—no, nor immodest, nor unmaidenly, however appearances might tell against her. Neither had she done any wrong, or even suffered any wrong; for she had scarcely a fault in her nature to lead her into any evil, and never an enemy in the world to do her any injury. Nor had she quarreled with a betrothed lover and sought to revenge herself upon him by rushing into this low marriage; but she had never been in love and never been engaged. Neither did she hurry towards matrimony as a refuge from domestic despotism, for she was the petted darling of a widowed and childless uncle, who had been a father to her orphanage; and she had had her own right royal will and way all her little life. If there were any despotic tyrant at old Promontory Hall, that tyrant was the dainty little beauty, Gloria de la Vera herself, and if there were any “down-trodden” slave, that victim was the renowned military hero, Colonel Marcellus de Crespigney! Why, then, since no reasonable, nor even unreasonable motive could be found for the mad act, should Gloria de la Vera wish to hurl herself head-long down into the deep perdition of a low and loveless marriage? To elucidate the mystery we must narrate the incidents of her short life. On the coast of Maryland there is a bleak head of land thrown out into the sea, and united to the main only by a long and narrow neck of rocks. If this weird headland had been a little loftier it would have been a promontory—or if the neck of rocks had been a little lower it would have been an island.