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 at the foot of the stairs she shrank from his greeting—­emotion in which he in his simple, loyal soul saw no repugnance, but only maiden reserve to be reverenced, as he drew her arm within his own to lead her before the bishop; how she faltered during the whole of the marriage ceremony; how like a woman in a trance she passed through the scenes of the wedding breakfast and those that immediately followed it; how in her own room, where she went to change her wedding dress for a traveling suit, and whither her gentle old grandmother had followed her for a private parting, she had answered the old lady’s anxious question as to whether she was “happy,” first by silence and then by muttering that her heart was too full for speech; how when the bridegroom and the bride had taken leave of all their friends at Rockhold, and were seated tete-a-tete in their traveling carriage, bowling along the river road, at the base of the East Ridge toward the North End railway station, when he passed his arm around her and drew her to his heart and murmured of his love and his joy in her ear, and pleaded for some response from her, she had only said that her heart was too full for speech, and he in his confiding spirit had perceived no evasion in her reply, but thought, if her heart was full, it was with responsive love for him.

My readers will recollect the railway journey to the State capital; the procession through the decorated streets between the crowded sidewalks from the railway station to the town house of Mr. Rockharrt, which had been placed at the disposal of the governor-elect for the interval between his arrival in the State capital and his inauguration.

The committee of reception escorted them to the gates of the Rockharrt mansion and left them at the door.  There we also left them, in the second chapter of this story—­and there we return to them in this place.

CHAPTER V.

THE GREAT RENUNCIATION.

When the governor-elect and his bride entered the Rockharrt town house, they were received by a group of obsequious servants, headed by Jason, the butler, and Jane, the housekeeper, and among whom stood Martha, lady’s maid to the new Mrs. Rothsay.