"Father, rebuke the liar,"--I said as I placed my hand on his shoulder.--"Raise your face, and tell him that he is the coiner of a falsehood, as atrocious as it is foolish--" My father did not reply. "And more than this,"--Burley went on, as though he had not heard me,--"I have it in my power, either to relieve your father from his financial embarrassments, or,--" he paused and surveyed me from head to foot, "or to denounce him to the government as one guilty, of something which it calls _piracy_,--to wit, an intimate relationship with the African slave trade." Again my father groaned, but did not raise his face. The full truth burst upon me. My father was ruined, and in this man's power. Confused,--half maddened, I flung myself upon my knees, and clasped Burley by the hands. "O, you will not ruin my father," I shrieked.--"You will save him." Burley took my hands within his own, and bent down, until I felt his breath upon my cheeks-- "Yes, I will save him," he whispered,--"That is, for a price,--your hand, my dear." His look could not be mistaken. At the same moment, my father raised his face from his hands,--it was pallid, distorted, stamped with despair. "It is the only way, Marion," he said in a broken voice,--"Otherwise your father must rot in a felon's cell." Amid all the misfortunes of a varied and changeful life, the agony of that moment has never once been forgotten. I felt the blood rush to my head-- "Be it so," I cried,--and fell like a dead woman on the floor, at the feet of Mr. Issachar Burley. CHAPTER VIII. NIAGARA. The next day we were married. In the dusk of the evening four figures stood in the spacious parlor of my father's mansion, by the light of a single waxen-candle. There was the clergyman, gazing in dumb surprise upon the parties to this ill-assorted marriage, there was my father, his countenance vacant almost to imbecility,--for the blow had stricken his intellect--there was the bridegroom, his countenance glowing with sensual triumph; and there the bride, pale as the bridal-dress which enveloped her form, about to be sacrificed on the altar of an unholy marriage. We were married, and between the parlor and the bridal chamber, one hope remained. Rather than submit to the embrace of the unworthy sensualist, I had determined to die, even upon the threshold of the bridal chamber. I had provided myself with a poniard. But alas! a glass of wine, drugged by my husband's hand, benumbed my reason, and when morning light broke upon me again, I found myself in his arms. The history of the next three months may be rapidly told, for they were months of agony and shame. "I have directed Walter by letter, to proceed from Havana to the city of Mexico," said my father to me, the second day after the marriage--"He will not return for six months, and certainly until his return, shall not hear of this,--this,--marriage."