To the fiery Borderer it was an insupportable situation.  His temper went.  The broken coin was cast to the ground, and with furious words he poured out on Lady Stair all his long pent-up anger.  Then, turning to her who, so short a time before, had been all the world to him, he cast on her the curse, “For you, madam, you will be a world’s wonder,” and strode from the room, his face ablaze with wrath, black murder in his heart.  Scotland was no longer a friendly home for Andrew, Lord Rutherfurd.  He went abroad, and died there sixteen years later.

Meantime the preparations for the marriage of young Baldoon with Lord Stair’s daughter went on apace.  The bride showed no active dislike to the bridegroom her parents had provided, but behaved as a mere lay figure on which wedding garments were fitted, and which received with cold unresponsiveness all the attentions of the man who was to be her husband.  When the wedding day—­August 24th, 1669—­arrived, a large assemblage of relations and friends of both bride and bridegroom mustered at Carsecreugh.  And still the white-faced lay figure mechanically went through all that was required of her, received the compliments and jests of the company with chill politeness, but with never a smile—­a bride of marble, with a heart that had turned to stone.  She rode pillion to church behind a young brother who afterwards said that the hand which lay on his as she held her arm round his waist was “cold and damp as marble.”  “Full of his new dress and the part he acted in the procession, the circumstance, which he long afterwards remembered with bitter sorrow and compunction, made no impression on him at the time.”

Great were the festivities that Lord and Lady Stair had prepared for the wedding of their daughter with so eligible a suitor as the young laird of Baldoon, and when the ceremony in the church was over, there were great doings at Carsecreugh.  Baldoon must either have been a very stupid man or a wilfully blind one, for his bride of snow seemed to look on everything that took place with vacant, unseeing, unsmiling eyes, and spoke and acted as one in a dream.

In the evening there was a dance.  One can see the bright lights, the gaily-coloured wedding garments of the festive company, hear the sound of clarionet and of fiddle gaily jigging out country dances, and the loud hum of talk and laughter of the many guests.  Baldoon, a proud husband, tricked out in all the finery of a bridegroom of that day, leads out his bride, the beautiful Janet, in her white bridal robe.  Can he not feel the clammy chill of the little hand he takes in his?  Why does he not understand the piteous look in the eyes of the girl whose feet are treading so gay a measure?  No trapped bird with broken wing was ever more pitiful.

While the guests still were making merry, the bride and her bridesmaids went up to the bridal chamber.  The virgins who prepared Iphigenia for her sacrifice had a task no less terrible.  Then, amidst the animal jocularities that were looked on as wit in that day, the bridegroom followed, and the best man locked the door on the married pair and put the key in his pocket.