"As God is my judge," he cried, "you shall be my wife, and no other man's! I will not let you escape me! And to make matters sure, we will give neither my son--who would bring my name to shame--nor envious people the power to say a word to hurt your feelings. We will be married privately, by the registrar. Leave all to me. I look upon you as my wife from this day. Place your hand in mine, and say you will marry me, or I will never more believe in woman's truth." His impetuosity carried the day--he spoke with the fire of a young man of twenty-five. She placed her hand in his, and said, "I am yours." Three weeks afterwards, Lydia Wilson became Mr. Holdfast's wife, and his son Frederick was in ignorance that he had married again. The date of the marriage was exactly two years to the day before the fatal night upon which Mr. Holdfast was found murdered in No. 119 Great Porter Square. [Decoration] CHAPTER XIX. THE "EVENING MOON" CONTINUES ITS ACCOUNT OF THE TRAGEDY, AND DESCRIBES THE SHAMEFUL PART ENACTED BY MR. FREDERICK HOLDFAST IN HIS FATHER'S HOUSE. When a man of Mr. Holdfast's age and wealth marries, for love, a lady thirty years younger than himself, his friends generally regard him with pity, and predict that the day must arrive when he will awake from his infatuated dream. "Warm-blooded May and cold-blooded December," say Mrs. Grundy and her family; "what can be expected?" They are much more uncharitable towards the lady, if she happen to be poor, as in such cases she is almost certain to be. It is not possible for her to awake from her dream, for she is judged as having been very wide awake, and as having entrapped the poor man with wiles most artfully designed and carried out, fooling the doting old lover to the top of his bent, her eyes and heart set upon nothing but his money. The judgment is too often correct. Beauty sacrificing itself at the altar of Mammon is no new subject for writer or painter whose satires are drawn from truth and nature. But an arrow tipped with these feathers of false feeling, and aimed at Mr. Holdfast and his lovely bride, would have fallen short of its mark. Their match, despite the disparity of age, was in the best sense of the word a love-match. On Mr. Holdfast's side there could be no doubt of it; and as little doubt could there be of a creature so guileless as Lydia Wilson, who had been brought up in the most delightful ignorance of the value of money. "We loved each other to the last," says the innocent and much-wronged widow. "To have saved my dear husband's life I would have sacrificed my own--willingly, joyfully have sacrificed it!" By what strange roads, then, had so fair a commencement been conducted to so foul and tragic an end? Reference has already been made to Mr. Holdfast's son Frederick, and the sketch we have given of his character will be a sufficient indication of the kind of man he was. We speak of him in the past tense, for he is dead.