Colonel Macon made five strides towards him, and seized his hand.  “What,” said he, “how——?”

Mr Brandon did not look at him; he let his eyes fall where they chose; it mattered not to him what they gazed upon; and, in a low voice, he said:  “It is all over.”

“Over!” repeated the colonel.

Mr Brandon put a feeble hand on his friend’s arm, and together they walked into the reading room, where they sat down in a corner.

“Have you settled it then?” asked Colonel Macon with great anxiety.  “Is she gone?”

“It is settled,” said Mr Brandon.  “We are to be married.”

“Married!” cried Colonel Macon, springing to his feet.  “Great Heavens, man!  What do you mean?”

Not very fluently, and in sentences with a very few words in each of them, but words that sank like hot coals into the soul of his hearer, Mr Brandon explained what he meant.  It had been of no use, he said, to try to get out of it; the old woman had him with the grip of a vise.  That letter had done it all.  He ought to have known that she was not to be frightened, but it was needless to talk about that.  It was all over now, and he was as much bound to her as if he had promised before a magistrate.

“But you don’t mean to say,” exclaimed the colonel in a voice of anguish, “that you are really going to marry her?”

“Sir,” said Mr Brandon, solemnly, “there is no way to get out of it.  If you think there is, you don’t know the woman.”

“I would have died first!” said the colonel.  “I never would have submitted to her!”

“I did not submit,” replied Mr Brandon.  “That was done when the letter was written.  I roused myself, and I said everything I could say, but it was all useless, she held me to my promise.  I told her I would fly to the ends of the earth rather than marry her, and then, sir, she threatened me with a prosecution for breach of promise; and think of the disgrace that that would bring upon me; upon my family name; and on my niece and her young husband.  It was a mistake, sir, to suppose that she merely wished to persecute me.  She wished to marry me, and she is going to do it.”

The colonel bowed his face upon his hands, and groaned.  Mr Brandon looked at him with a dim compassion in his eyes.  “Do not reproach yourself, sir,” he said.  “We thought we were acting for the best.”

But little more was said, and two crushed old gentlemen retired to their rooms.

In the days of her youth, Mrs Keswick had been very well known in Richmond; and there were a good many elderly ladies and gentlemen, now living in that city, who remembered her as a handsome, sparkling, and somewhat eccentric young woman, and who had since heard of her as a decidedly eccentric old one.  Mr Brandon, also, had a large circle of friends and acquaintances in the city; and when it became known that these two elderly persons were to be married—­and the news began to spread shortly after Mrs Keswick reached the house of the friend with whom she was staying—­it excited a great deal of excusable interest.