CHAPTER I.

A brilliant match.

“I remember Regulas Rothsay—­or Rule, as we used to call him—­when he was a little bit of a fellow hardly up to my knee, running about bare-footed and doing odd jobs round the foundry.  Ah! and now he is elected governor of this State by the biggest majority ever heard of, and engaged to be married to the finest young lady in the country, with the full consent of all her proud relations.  To be married to-day and to be inaugurated to-morrow, and he only thirty-two years old this blessed seventh of June!”

The speaker, a hale man of sixty years, with a bald head, a sharp face, a ruddy complexion, and a figure as twisted as a yew tree, and about as tough, was Silas Marwig, one of the foremen of the foundry.

“Well, I don’t believe Regulas Rothsay would ever have risen to his present position if it had not been for his love of Corona Haught.  No more do I believe that Old Rockharrt would ever have allowed his beautiful granddaughter to be engaged to Rothsay if the young man had not been elected governor,” observed a stout, florid-faced matron of fifty-five.  “How hard he worked for her!  And how long she waited for him!  Why, I remember them both so well!  They were the very best of friends from their childhood—­the wealthy little lady and the poor orphan boy.”

“That is very true, Mrs. Bounce,” said a young man, who was a newcomer in the neighborhood and one of the bookkeepers of the great firm.  “But how did that orphan get his education?”

“By hook and by crook, as the saying is, Mr. Wall.  I think the little lady taught him to read and write, and she loaned him books.  He left here when he was about thirteen years old.  He went to the city, and got into the printing office of The National Watch.  And he learned the trade.  And, oh, you know a bright, earnest boy like that was bound to get on.  He worked hard, and he studied hard.  After awhile he began to write short, telling paragraphs for the Watch, and these at length were noticed and copied, and he became assistant editor of the paper.  By the time he was twenty-five years old he had bought the paper out.”

“And, of course, he made it a power in politics.  I see the rest.  He was elected State representative; then State senator.”

“Yes, indeed.  You’ve hit it.  And now he is going to marry his first love to-day, and to take his seat as governor to-morrow,” continued the matron, with a little chuckle.

“Regulas Rothsay will never take his seat as governor,” spoke a solemn voice from the thicket on the right of the road along which the party were walking to the scene of the grand wedding.  All turned to see a strange form step out from the shelter of the trees—­a tall, gaunt, swarthy woman, stern of feature and harsh of tone; her head covered with wild, straggling black hair; her body clothed in a long, clinging garment of dark red serge.