It was a pretty, old-world speech. Betty thought--or affected to think--it meant nothing. But it was the opening gun of a swift campaign. Day after day thereafter, Burr neglected his fast-growing law business to drive out to the house above the river. Every day he drew the siege lines closer to the citadel. At length he asked Betty to marry him. With a final glimmer of common sense, she refused. He went away. Betty feared he would not come back. But he did. He came back the very next day--July 1, 1833. And with him in the carriage was another old man--the Reverend Doctor Bogart, who had performed the marriage ceremony for Burr and the latter's first wife. To the butler who admitted them, Burr gave a curt message for Madame Jumel, asking that she come down to them at once in the drawing-room. Wondering, she obeyed. "Madam," said Burr, by way of salutation, "I have come here to-day to marry you. Pray get ready at once!" Betty indignantly refused, and all but ordered her suitor and the clergyman from the house. Then Burr began to talk. The consummate eloquence that had swayed prejudiced juries to his will, the love pleas that no woman had been able to hear unmoved, the matchless skill at argument that had made him master of men and women alike--all were brought into play. An aged, discredited, half-impoverished failure was asking a beautiful and enormously rich woman to be his wife. Those were the cold facts. But cold facts had a way of vanishing before Aaron Burr's personality. Perhaps the greatest lingual triumph of his seventy-eight years was won when this feeble old man broke down within half an hour all Betty's defenses of coquetry and of sanity as well. At last she ran from the room, murmuring that she would "decide and let him know." Burr sank back wearily in his chair. The victory was won. He knew it. A little later Betty reappeared at the head of the stairs. She was resplendent in a gown of thick, stiff, dove-colored satin, and she glittered with a thousand jewels. Burr, lightly as a boy, ran up the stairs to meet her. Without a word she took his proffered arm. Together they walked to where the clergyman, stationed by Burr, awaited them. And they were married--super-woman and super-man. I know of no other instance in the History of Love where two such consummate heart breakers became man and wife. It would be pleasant to record that the magnetic old couple walked hand and hand into the sunset; that their last years were spent together in the light of the afterglow. Here was a husband after Betty's own heart. Here was a wife to excite the envy of all Burr's friends, to rehabilitate him socially and financially. It seemed an ideal union.