The room was crowded with guests, elegantly arrayed, the men in their fine black reception suits, the women in their satins and laces and sparkling jewels. Hot-house flowers were in profusion everywhere. A beautiful horse-shoe, formed with white flowers, depended from the ceiling, and beneath it Lily saw a group that seemed to freeze the blood in her veins to solid ice. Brilliantly beautiful, flushed with love and triumph, Mrs. Vance stood there in elaborate bridal robes, leaning on the arm of a splendidly handsome young man. His face was slightly turned away, but Lily knew it was none other than her own betrothed, Lancelot Darling, who was listening so calmly there to the opening words of the beautiful marriage service read by the lips of the white-haired and venerable clergyman. At one glance she took in the whole appalling scene, and then a shriek of agony, loud, piercing, horror-stricken, broke from the lips of the stricken girl, thrilling every heart with terror. CHAPTER XXXVIII. So wild and startling was that anguished scream that even the bride and groom sprang apart and looked toward the door in terror. Lance saw his lost darling standing there, clinging to the arm of her father, the dark hood thrown back from her head, and her golden hair streaming over her shoulders and about her lovely face, now convulsed with pain and grief. With a wild prescience of the truth, he rushed forward and with a ringing cry of joy caught his darling to his heart. At the same moment the clear, full voice of the detective pealed through the large apartment thronged with wedding guests, with the suddenness of a trumpet call. "Mrs. Vance, I arrest you for the attempted murder of Lily Lawrence, and that of Haidee and Peter Leveret!" The detective had instantly recognized her form as that of the woman he had seen walking in the road near the Leveret house the day of the murder, and the conviction rushed upon him with the suddenness of a flash of lightning. None who were present ever forgot the look of the guilty woman as those clarion tones fell upon her ears. Her brain was reeling with horror, her heart beat to suffocation's verge as she beheld Lancelot clasping her rival to his heart. When the detective's ringing voice with its dreadful accusation reached her hearing, she turned her face on him a moment, and its expression of awful horror and black despair was fearful to behold. The next instant she threw up her arms with a wail of agony, and fell down in a writhing heap upon the floor. The aged minister, who stood nearer to her than the rest of the guests, hastened to lift her up, though he was trembling so perceptibly he could hardly stand. As he raised the dark head on his arm and turned her face upward to the light, a stream of blood gushed from her lips and poured its crimson rain upon the stainless whiteness of her bridal robe and veil.