expect to find the bereaved one inconsolable, but he was certainly staggered to behold her busy in preparations for a second marriage.  Indignant at what he conceived to be an affront upon the memory of his friend, he argued and remonstrated against her indecent haste, and besought her to postpone the unseemly union.  Roused by all he saw, the faithful friend spoke warmly on the deceased’s behalf, and painted in the strongest colours he could employ, the enormity of her transgression.  Now Margaret loved Michael as she had never loved before.  Slander could not open its lying lips to speak one word against the esteem and gratitude she had ever entertained for Mildred but esteem and gratitude—­I appeal to the best, the most virtuous and moral of my readers—­cannot put out the fire that nature kindles in the adoring heart of woman.  Her error was not that she loved Michael more, but that she had loved Mildred less.  Ambition, if it usurp the rights of love, must look for all the punishment that love inflicts.  Sooner or later it must come.  “Who are you?” enquires the little god of the greater god, ambition, “that you should march into my realms, and create rebellion there?  Wait but a little.”  Short was the interval between ambition’s crime and love’s revenge with our poor Margaret.  Wilford might never know how cruelly his bitter words wrung her smitten soul.  She did not answer him.  Paler she grew with every reproach—­deeper was the self-conviction with every angry syllable.  She wept until he left her, and then she wrote to Michael.  As matters stood, and with their present understanding—­he was perhaps her best adviser.  Wilford called to see her on the following day—­but Margaret’s door was shut against him, and she beheld her husband’s friend no more.

And the blissful day came on—­slowly, at last, to the happy lovers—­for happy they were in each other’s sight, and in their passionate attachment.  And the blissful day arrived.  Michael led her to the altar.  A hundred curious eyes looked on, admired, and praised, and envied.  He might be proud of his possession, were she unendowed with any thing but that incomparable, unfading loveliness.  And he, with his young and vigorous form, was he not made for that rare plant to clasp and hang upon?  “Heaven bless them both!” So said the multitude, and so say I, although I scarce can hope it; for who shall dare to think that Heaven will grant its benediction on a compact steeped in earthliness, and formed without one heavenward view!

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THE WRONGS OF WOMEN.