"Now Alice, my dear child, don't give up my Mary, nor think her a heartless being, when I tell you that in six months from that time she became Mrs. Gardner. A very lovely bride she was, too--pale as a snow-drop, and graceful as the lake-lily. She smiled, too, with a sort of contented smile, not radiant, not heartfelt, not joyous; there were no deeps of her being stirred as she stood calm and passionless by the altar, and promised to love and honor Mr. Gardner, but a very quiet and pensive sort of pleasure. A part of her soul seemed to have been buried with the past, and to have been forcibly crushed down with all its young ardor and bloom forever; but above it was an everyday being, full of determination to do her duty, to make her husband happy, and be as happy herself as she could. So she was married; and so she stepped into a handsome carriage with Mr. Gardner, and the bridemaids and groomsmen followed in another; and never was there a gayer and merrier cavalcade than at Mary Dunbar's marriage. CHAPTER II. "Now, my dear girls, you must skip over a few years, during which I neither saw nor heard of Mary Dunbar. I returned from a journey which I had been taking, and was glad to feel that Mr. Gardner's house lay in my nearest route home. I longed to see Mary in her new character, now that she had had time to feel and perform her duties, and proposed to be with her for a few days, that I might form my own opinion touching this 'mariage de convenance.' "Mr. Gardner's house was one of some pretension originally; that is to say, it had been built in the style of country gentlemen in New England forty years ago. A row of white-pine pillars surrounded the house from roof to basement, and formed a piazza-walk very convenient in a dull day. Six chimneys crowned the roof, and the whole arrangement was tasteful and imposing. There was a terrace of green turf all round the house, and the offices and out-buildings were at a short distance from the main building. As the stage-coach wound up the avenue, I noticed in the disposition of the grounds and shrubbery the evident hand of female taste. Fantastic arbors, almost hid behind clematis and honeysuckle; little white arches supporting twining roses of twenty sorts, and trees arranged in picturesque groups, gave a character of beautiful wildness to the scenery. "I fancied Mary the presiding genius of the place as I last had seen her, white and bright, with a little rose-tint on her cheek, caught from nature and the happy quiet of her life--for I had heard that she rejoiced in an infant, whose beauty and promise I knew must renew all the affectionate sympathies of her woman's heart.