In other and more prosaic words, there hung--no uncommon circumstance--a mist over the low-lying lands through which a certain little winding river called the Bram pursued its devious course. The day--there was no safer prognostic than that light and silvery nebulousness--would be a glorious one, and the bonny bride of that same first of May was, it might be hoped, fated to be another of the proverbially “happy” ones on whom the sun’s sympathising rays had warmly shone. The girl--so soon to be that thing which _man_ has made--a _woman_ (it was simply a _female_ that the hand of God created)--gazed out upon the peaceful scene--on the budding trees in which the loving birds were twittering, on the path through the meadows, trod so often by the merry children when she--scarcely more than a child herself--had headed their joyous company in merry search of the dab-chicks’ nests lying peaceably in the reeds beside the Bram, or of wild flowers, fresh and sweet, cropping up through the long grass in the sunny meadows. It was her wedding-day--her day of days--and yet something very like a sigh broke from the Irish girl’s lips, and there was a moisture (could it be the dew of tears?) upon her cheek. She was not unhappy--no, and a thousand times no--she _could_ not be sorrowful with the love of a good man assured to her, and with the promise of such a home as it was in John Beacham’s power to give. She was certainly not unhappy. She had promised to be John’s wife unhesitatingly, and with a grateful heart. He had only done his promised bride justice when he had declared that she was neither vain nor aspiring. Honor could not be ignorant of the fact that she was beautiful, but of the power and the advantages of beauty she knew as little as did Mrs. Clay’s two-year-old child. It could hardly then be owing to a latent feeling that she was throwing her rare loveliness away--casting, so to speak, her pearls before swine--that Honor’s heart was at that moment heavy within her; and yet, could John have looked on her at that moment--could he have seen the listless attitude and the clouded brow of the girl he so fondly loved--he would have been justified in reading repentance where he would have looked for joy. And, as I said before, he would have been mistaken. There was none--no, not even the shadow of a regret on Honor’s part for the promises that had so firmly bound her to be a farmer’s wife. Only the day before her spirits were as buoyant, and her heart as light, as in the joyous days gone by; only the evening before she had, with all a young girl’s natural pleasure in self-adornment, entered into the full spirit of the _rôle_ in which her bridal costume was to play so all-important a part. The wedding-dress, pretty and pure and tasteful, although no hand more cunning than that of the humble Leigh artiste had been employed in its confection, had been pronounced by the jury of maids and matrons assembled to give judgment on its merits to be a