“I have had an uncommon narrow squeak of it,” he muttered to himself occasionally, as he smoked a meditative pipe, “and have been as near seeing the inside of Portland prison as ever a man was.  But it’ll be a warning to me in future.  And yet who could have thought that things would have gone against me as they did?  There was Sir Philip Christopher’s bay colt Pigskin, for instance; that brute was bound to win.”

February came to an end; and when March once began, there seemed no pause or breathing-time for Ellen Carley till the 10th.  And yet she had little business to occupy her during those bleak days of early spring.  It was the horror of that rapid flight of time, which seemed independent of her own life in its hideous swiftness.  Idle or busy, it was all the same.  The days would not linger for her; the dreaded 10th was close at hand.

Frank Randall was still in London, in that solicitor’s office—­a firm of some standing in the City—­to which he had gone on leaving his father.  He had written two or three times to Ellen since he left Hampshire, and she had answered his letters secretly; but pleasant though it was to her to hear from him, she begged him not to write, as her father’s anger would be extreme if a letter should by any evil chance fall into his hands.  So within the last few months there had been no tidings of Ellen’s absent lover, and the girl was glad that it was so.  What could she have said to him if she had been compelled to tell him of her engagement to Stephen Whitelaw?  What excuse could she have made for marrying a man about whom she had been wont to express herself to Frank Randall in most unequivocal terms?  Excuse there was none, since she could not betray her father.  It was better, therefore, that young Randall should hear of her marriage in the common course of things, and that he should think of her just as badly as he pleased.  This was only one more poisoned drop in a cup that was all bitterness.

“He will believe that I was a hypocrite at heart always,” the unhappy girl said to herself, “and that I value Stephen Whitelaw’s money more than his true heart—­that I can marry a man I despise and dislike for the sake of being rich.  What can he think worse of me than that? and how can he help thinking that?  He knows that I have a good spirit of my own, and that my father could not make me do anything against my will.  He will never believe that this marriage has been all my father’s doing.”

The wedding morning came at last, bright and spring-like, with a sun that shone as gaily as if it had been lighting the happiest union that was ever recorded in the hymeneal register.  There were the first rare primroses gleaming star-like amidst the early greenery of high grassy banks in solitary lanes about Crosber, and here and there the tender blue of a violet.  It would have seemed a very fair morning upon which to begin the first page in the mystic volume of a new life, if Ellen Carley had been going to marry a man