a faint light
struggling through her blind. 'Now what were those noises?' To settle
that question seemed more to her than the event of the day.

She pulled the blind aside and looked out. All was plain. The evening
previous had closed in with a grey drizzle, borne upon a piercing air
from the north, and now its effects were visible. The hoary drizzle
still continued; but the trees and shrubs were laden with icicles to an
extent such as she had never before witnessed. A shoot of the diameter
of a pin's head was iced as thick as her finger; all the boughs in
the park were bent almost to the earth with the immense weight of the
glistening incumbrance; the walks were like a looking-glass. Many boughs
had snapped beneath their burden, and lay in heaps upon the icy grass.
Opposite her eye, on the nearest tree, was a fresh yellow scar, showing
where the branch that had terrified her had been splintered from the
trunk.

'I never could have believed it possible,' she thought, surveying the
bowed-down branches, 'that trees would bend so far out of their true
positions without breaking.' By watching a twig she could see a drop
collect upon it from the hoary fog, sink to the lowest point, and there
become coagulated as the others had done.

'Or that I could so exactly have imitated them,' she continued. 'On this
morning I am to be married--unless this is a scheme of the great Mother
to hinder a union of which she does not approve. Is it possible for my
wedding to take place in the face of such weather as this?'

2. MORNING

Her brother Owen was staying with Manston at the Old House. Contrary
to the opinion of the doctors, the wound had healed after the first
surgical operation, and his leg was gradually acquiring strength, though
he could only as yet get about on crutches, or ride, or be dragged in a
chair.

Miss Aldclyffe had arranged that Cytherea should be married from
Knapwater House, and not from her brother's lodgings at Budmouth, which
was Cytherea's first idea. Owen, too, seemed to prefer the plan. The
capricious old maid had latterly taken to the contemplation of the
wedding with even greater warmth than had at first inspired her, and
appeared determined to do everything in her power, consistent with her
dignity, to render the adjuncts of the ceremony pleasing and complete.

But the weather seemed in flat contradiction of the whole proceeding. At
eight o'clock the coachman crept up to the House almost upon his hand