iendly home for Andrew, Lord
Rutherfurd. He went abroad, and died there sixteen years later.

Meantime the preparations for the marriage of young Baldoon with Lord
Stair's daughter went on apace. The bride showed no active dislike to
the bridegroom her parents had provided, but behaved as a mere lay
figure on which wedding garments were fitted, and which received with
cold unresponsiveness all the attentions of the man who was to be her
husband. When the wedding day--August 24th, 1669--arrived, a large
assemblage of relations and friends of both bride and bridegroom
mustered at Carsecreugh. And still the white-faced lay figure
mechanically went through all that was required of her, received the
compliments and jests of the company with chill politeness, but with
never a smile--a bride of marble, with a heart that had turned to stone.
She rode pillion to church behind a young brother who afterwards said
that the hand which lay on his as she held her arm round his waist was
"cold and damp as marble." "Full of his new dress and the part he acted
in the procession, the circumstance, which he long afterwards remembered
with bitter sorrow and compunction, made no impression on him at the
time."

Great were the festivities that Lord and Lady Stair had prepared for the
wedding of their daughter with so eligible a suitor as the young laird
of Baldoon, and when the ceremony in the church was over, there were
great doings at Carsecreugh. Baldoon must either have been a very stupid
man or a wilfully blind one, for his bride of snow seemed to look on
everything that took place with vacant, unseeing, unsmiling eyes, and
spoke and acted as one in a dream.

In the evening there was a dance. One can see the bright lights, the
gaily-coloured wedding garments of the festive company, hear the sound
of clarionet and of fiddle gaily jigging out country dances, and the
loud hum of talk and laughter of the many guests. Baldoon, a proud
husband, tricked out in all the finery of a bridegroom of that day,
leads out his bride, the beautiful Janet, in her white bridal robe. Can
he not feel the clammy chill of the little hand he takes in his? Why
does he not understand the piteous look in the eyes of the girl whose
feet are treading so gay a measure? No trapped bird with broken wing was
ever more pitiful.

While the guests still were making merry, the bride and her bridesmaids
went up to the bridal chamber. The virgins who prepared Iphigenia for