rriage. When all were seated in this, the old
man leant toward the young one, and said:

"Well, I haven't had a chance to ask you yet. The election is over. How
did it go? Who is their man?"

"They chose me," answered Rothsay, simply.

Cora Haught's bosom was wrung by hopeless passion and piercing remorse.

Yet she tried to do her whole duty.

"If it craze or kill me I will wed Rule, and he shall never know what it
costs me to keep my word," she said to herself, as she lay sleepless and
restless in her bed on the night before her wedding morn. "Yes; I will
do my duty and keep my secret even unto death."

"'Even unto death!' but unto whose death?" whispered a voice close to
her ear--a voice clear, distinct, penetrating.

Cora started and opened her eyes. No one was near her. She sat up in
bed, and looked around the apartment. The night taper, standing on the
hearth, burned low. The dimly lighted room was vacant of any human being
except herself.

"I have been dreaming," she said, and she laid down and tried to compose
herself to sleep again. In vain! Memories of the near past, dread of the
nearer future, contended in her soul, filling her with discord. When
Cora arose on her wedding morning, she said to herself:

"Yes, this day I am going to marry Rule, dear, loving, faithful,
hard-working, self-denying Rule! A monarch among men, if greatness of
soul could make a monarch. In that sense no woman, peeress or princess,
ever made a prouder match. May Heaven make me worthier of him! May
Heaven help me to be a true, good wife to him!"

She said these words to herself, but oh! oh! how she shuddered as she
breathed them, and how she reproached herself for such shuddering! The
girl's whole nature was at war with itself. Yet through all the terrible
interior strife she kept her firm determination to be faithful to Rule;
to go through the ordeal before her, even though it should cost her life
or reason.

The external circumstances of this wedding were given in the first
chapter, and need not be repeated here.

My readers may remember the marble-like stillness of the bride as she
sat in her bridal robes, looking out from the front window of her
chamber on the bright and festive scene below, where all the work people
from the mines and foundries were assembled; they will remember how she
shivered when she was summoned with her bridesmaids to meet her
bridegroom and his attendants in the hall below; how when she met him