How swiftly that fortnight had flown for Isobel! how charged with heavy hours for Marjory! and to-morrow was the eventful day. What doings in Bell's Tower during this intervening time! what pattering of feet along the sombre lobbies! what gossiping among servants! what applications to the gate--comings and goings! and the rooms, how bestrewn with clippings of silk, and stray bits of artificial flowers! And, amidst all the triumphing, Isobel displayed her nature in spite of old saws and maxims, which lay upon brides conditions of reserve and humility, held to be so becoming in those who, as it were, occupy the place of a sacrifice; yea, if some tears are shed, so much better is custom obeyed. Then where could Marjory go, in the midst of this confusion of gaiety?--where, as the poet says, "weep her woes" in secret, and listen to the throbbings of a broken heart? Not in her own room, in the lower part of the castle tower, where her mother had still the privilege of chiding her for throwing the shadows of melancholy over a scene of happiness, and where Isobel would force an entrance, to show her, in the very spite of her evil nature, some bridal present from him who was still to the deserted one the idol of her heart. There was scarcely a refuge for grief, where joy was impatient of check, and, like all tyrants, would force reluctant conditions into a unanimity of compliance; but up these castle stairs, in the second room, there was one whom time had shut out from the sympathies of the world, so old, as to be almost forgotten, except by Marjory herself, who, all gentleness and love, delighted to supply vacant hearts with the fervours of her friendship, and to ameliorate evils by the appliances of her humanity. With languid step she ascended the stair, and was presently beside her great-grandaunt, Patricia Bower. Twilight was dropping her wing, and the shadows were fast collecting round the square windows, which, narrow and grated, would scarcely at noonday let in light enough to enliven the human eye. There, solitary and in the gloom, sat the creature of the prior century, whose birth could only be arrived at by going through generations back ninety and five years before; but not gloom to her, to whom the light of memory was as a necromancer, arraying before the gleg eye of her spirit the images of persons and things and circumstances of the far past, with all the vividness of enchantment, and still even raising again those very loves and sympathies they elicited when they were of the passing hour. Yet the doings in this house of Bell's Tower at the time, so far removed from the period of the living archetypes of her dreams, had got to her ear, where still the word marriage was a charm, against which the dry impassable nerve resisted in vain. "I will go to this marriage, Marjory," she said, as the maiden entered, and without appearing to notice her distress. "No, aunt," replied Marjory, as she sat down opposite to her.