child, she acted as she felt and _did_ try on the bridal dress, did scream with delight when Valencia fastened the veil and let its fleecy folds fall gracefully around her. “I wonder what Arthur will think. I so wish he was here,” she had said, ordering a glass brought, that she might see herself from behind, and know just how much her dress trailed, and how it looked beneath the costly veil. She was very beautiful in her bridal robes, and she kept them on till Fanny began to chide her for her vanity, and even then she lingered before the mirror as if loth to take them off. “I don’t believe in presentiments,” she said, “but do you know it seems to me just as if I should never wear this again,” and she smoothed thoughtfully the folds of the heavy silk she had just laid upon the bed. “I don’t know what can happen to prevent it, unless Arthur should die. He was so pale last Sunday, and seemed so weak that I shuddered every time I looked at him. I mean to drive round there this afternoon,” she continued. “I suppose it is too cold for him to venture out, and he has no carriage, either.” Accordingly she went to the rectory that afternoon, and the women in the church saw her as she drove by, the gorgeous colors of her carriage-blanket flashing in the wintry sunshine, and the long white feather in her hat waving up and down as she nodded to them. There was a little too much of the lady patroness about her to suit the plain Hanoverians, especially those who were neither high enough nor low enough to be honored with her notice; and as they returned to their wreath-making and gossip, they wondered under their breath if it would not on the whole have been better if their clergyman had married Anna Ruthven, instead of the fine city girl with her Parisian manners. As they said this, a gleam of intelligence shot from the gray eyes of Valencia Le Barre, who was there at work in a most unamiable mood. “_She_ did not like to stain her hands with the nasty hemlock, more than other folks,” she had said, when, after the trying on of the bridal dress, Lucy had remonstrated with her for some duty neglected, and then bidden her go to the church and help if she was needed. “I must certainly dismiss you unless you improve,” Lucy had said to the insolent girl, who went unwillingly to the church, where she sat tying wreaths when the carriage went by. She had thought many times of the letter she had read, and more than once when particularly angry it had been upon her lips to tell her mistress that she was not Mr. Leighton’s _first_ choice, if indeed she was his choice at all; but there was something in Lucy’s manner which held her back, besides which she was rather unwilling to confess to her own meanness in reading the stolen letter.