The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Unseen Bridgegroom, by May Agnes Fleming

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Title: The Unseen Bridgegroom
or, Wedded For a Week

Author: May Agnes Fleming

Release Date: May 22, 2005 [EBook #15875]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE UNSEEN BRIDEGROOM;

OR,

WEDDED FOR A WEEK

BY MAY AGNES FLEMING

CHAPTER I.

THE WALRAVEN BALL.

A dark November afternoon--wet, and windy, and wild. The New York
streets were at their worst--sloppy, slippery, and sodden; the sky
lowering over those murky streets one uniform pall of inky gloom. A bad,
desolate, blood-chilling November afternoon.

And yet Mrs. Walraven's ball was to come off to-night, and it was rather
hard upon Mrs. Walraven that the elements should make a dead set at her
after this fashion.

The ball was to be one of the most brilliant affairs of the season, and
all Fifth Avenue was to be there in its glory.

Fifth Avenue was above caring for anything so commonplace as the
weather, of course; but still it would have been pleasanter, and only
a handsome thing in the clerk of the weather, considering Mrs. Walraven
had not given a ball for twenty years before, to have burnished up the
sun, and brushed away the clouds, and shut up that icy army of winter
winds, and turned out as neat an article of weather as it is possible
in the nature of November to turn out.

Of course, Mrs. Walraven dwelt on New York's stateliest avenue, in a big
brown-stone palace that was like a palace in an Eastern story, with its
velvet carpets, its arabesques, its filigree work, its chairs, and
tables, and sofas touched up and inlaid with gold, and cushioned in
silks of gorgeous dyes.

And in all Fifth Avenue, and in all New York City, there were not half
a dozen old women of sixty half so rich, half so arrogant, or half so
ill-tempered as Mrs. Ferdinand Walraven.

On this bad No