What an ending to a day that had been anticipated for months with the ardor of a true lover. Instead of wedding bells the slow procession to the grave, and now--far from the festal scene, alone among strangers who did not suspect his identity with the young millionaire Frank Laurier, terribly injured, perhaps unto death, how strange and sad a fate! And the bride--poor girl!--so beautiful, so proud, so imperious, who can picture the depths of her pain and humiliation, waiting more than an hour at the thronged, fashionable church for a laggard bridegroom who never came, who sent no excuse, who left her to suffer under one of the cruelest blows woman’s heart can bear--forsaken at the altar! She was taken home again by her relatives, a pallid, wild-eyed, half-frantic girl, vowing bitterest vengeance on her recreant lover as she stripped the bridal veil from her dark, queenly head, and tramped it angrily beneath her feet. “Thus I trample on the past, on all the love I bore him, and vow myself to vengeance!” she cried madly, to her cousin, Mrs. van Dorn, whose eyes filled with sympathetic tears as she cried: “It is a cruel blow, dear Cora, but do not be too rash in your anger. Perhaps something happened to prevent Frank’s coming and everything may yet be explained to your satisfaction.” But her consoling words rang hollow in her own ears, for she thought: “I had a presentiment of this on the way to the church. I felt certain that he would fail to meet Cora there. Oh, it was very cruel in him to wound the poor girl so. It is a disgrace that will cling to a girl through life, being jilted at the altar. How much kinder it would have been to break with her sooner and avoid a public exposé like the painful one we have had to-day. I feel almost as indignant as Cora at the slight put on our family!” Later on her husband looked in at the dressing-room door, saying kindly: “How is Cora, poor child? I have something to tell her about Laurier if I may come in!” “Speak quickly!” cried the half-distraught girl, turning almost fiercely upon him. “Has anything happened to the wretch?” “I was just about to say that I just now met Hazelton, and he told me he saw Laurier and Noel at Greenwood when the funeral services over your aunt’s daughter were concluded at the vault.” “At her funeral--in our bridal hour! False, wicked wretch! I will never forgive him, never! May the curse of a forsaken bride blight his life from now to the grave! May the cruelest misfortunes of life overtake him!” raved the insulted girl in the madness of her wounded love and pride. “Be calm, Cora, I shall avenge this slight to you,” her cousin said angrily, and just then he received a summons from downstairs. It was sunset, and Ernest Noel, very pale and shaken, had just been released on bail and come to bring them the news of all that had happened to prevent Laurier from meeting his bride at the altar--lying instead at a hospital at the point of death.