to Mr.
John Scott if he should come home before she did. And she told me never
to mind. I shouldn't have any call to say anything. _She_ should
see him before _I_ could. And so off she went that same night."

"What night was that?" slowly and faintly breathed Salome, without
lifting her fallen head.

"Two nights before--before the marriage was to have been, my lady,"
answered the woman, in a low and hesitating tone.

"Proceed, please."

"And now, my lady, I must tell you what happened at Lone, as I received
it from her own lips this very morning, before I came here. She went down
to Scotland by the night express of the Great Northern, and arrived at
Lone early in the morning of the day before the wedding-day that should
have been. She found great preparations going on for the marriage of the
markis and the heiress. She went over to the castle with the crowd of the
country people who gathered there to see the grand decorations for the
wedding. But she saw nothing of the bride or of the bridegroom; and,
moreover, she was warned off with threats by the servants of the castle.
But at length, towards night-fall, my lady, she saw Mr. John Scott, as he
called himself, hanging about the Hereward Arms, and she 'went for him,'
as the saying is. But he drew her apart from the crowd. And there she
charged him with perfidy, and threatened to appear at the church the next
day with her marriage lines and forbid the banns. He did all he could to
quiet her, said that she was deceived and mistaken, and that he could not
marry any one, being already married to herself, and that if she would
meet him that night at the castle, just under the balcony, near Malcolm's
Tower, he would explain everything to her satisfaction."

"_It was no dream, then!_ Oh, Heaven! it was no dream! And my own
senses witness against him!" exclaimed Salome again, throwing up her face
and hands with a cry of anguish, and then dropping them, as before, upon
the table in an attitude of abject despair.

"My lady, this is too much for you! too much!" said the compassionate
woman, weeping over the distress she had caused.

"No, no; go on, go on; I will hear it all. My own senses, pitying Heaven!
my own senses bear witness to it," moaned Salome, in a smothered voice.

"Ah, my lady, it grieves me deeply to go on, as you bid me. They met, Mr.
John Scott, as he called himself, and Rose Cameron, at the time and place
agreed on--at midnight at Castle Lone, under the b