Speechless with amazement, he watched her enter the church; the doors were clanged to behind her, and every eye was fixed upon her as she walked proudly up the aisle, leaning on her father’s arm. Lady Northborough could hardly refrain from a little cry of admiration. Her son’s description had prepared her for something ethereal, thin and pale to a fault; but this queenly young creature, with the proud little dark head, the perfect figure, and startlingly brilliant coloring, was no subject for pity, but rather for wondering admiration. “Gad! Where did the girl get her good looks from?” muttered the old Duke, who had occasionally an awkward habit of thinking aloud. As to Lord Carthew, he was enraptured by the alteration for the better in his lovely bride’s appearance. The strange restlessness of her glances he attributed to her natural nervousness, which caused her also to whisper and mumble the necessary responses in the service with even less than the ordinary bride’s accuracy. Sir Philip, watching his daughter closely, felt every moment more convinced that the girl’s brain and memory were momentarily clouded. She stared about her without reverence, but with evident curiosity, during the service, to which she paid not the slightest attention, and her bridegroom especially she continually regarded with a kind of amused wonder, as some specimen of humanity the like of whom she had never seen before. But no one else seemed to heed her irreverent behavior or to note that strange look as of suppressed laughter in her dancing eyes, and Sir Philip drew a deep sigh of relief when the ceremony was over, and the signing of the book followed. Here again a strange thing happened. The newly made Lady Carthew, after receiving with an odd little laugh the congratulatory kisses of her grandfather, the Duke, and the Countess, her mother-in-law, murmured that her hand shook so badly she could not hold a pen, and was with difficulty persuaded to scrawl “Stella Cranstoun,” in an almost undecipherable hand, on the page before her. Strange fears and fancies filled Sir Philip’s mind. Was her feverish color, her strange behavior, due to a partially paralyzed brain and nerves, he wondered. Still, she was Lady Carthew, and he had triumphed; but that strange likeness to her dead mother, which seemed so much stronger to-day than it had ever been before, troubled him, and that incomprehensible laugh in her eyes. “I wish Carthew joy of his bargain,” was Sir Philip’s mental comment. “But, in any case, she is in his charge now, and safely off my hands, so that there is no chance of that senseless old gypsy prophecy being realized.” CHAPTER XVIII. THE WEDDING JOURNEY. “Go to Grayling Station, and get into the two o’clock Portsmouth train with Lord C. and me.” Such was the message, scrawled in a shaky handwriting, on the scrap of paper thrust by the bride into Stephen Lee’s hand.