Accordingly, half unconscious of passing events, George Evans was conducted to the altar, where the marriage knot was indissolubly tied.  But, as soon as he had recovered from the effects of the bridal feast, he discovered, to his intense horror and dismay, that the bride he had taken was not the woman of his choice—­in short, he was the victim of a cheat.  Indignant at this cruel imposture, he ascertained that the plot emanated from the woman who, till then, had been the ideal of his soul, and that she had substituted her veiled sister Anne for herself at the altar.  The remainder of this strange affair is briefly told:—­George Evans had one, and only one, interview with his wife, and thus addressed her in the following words:  “Madam, you have attained your end.  I need not say how you bear my name; and, for the sake of your family, I acknowledge you as my wife.  You shall receive an income from me suitable to your situation.  This, probably, is all you cared for with regard to me, and you and I shall meet no more in this world.”

[Illustration:  “Madam, you have attained your end.  You and I shall meet no more in this world.”]

He would allow no explanation, and almost immediately left his home and country, never to meet again the woman who had so basely betrayed him.  The glory of Bulgaden Hall was gone.  Its young master, in order to quench his sorrow and bury his disgust, gave way to every kind of dissipation, and died its victim in 1769.  And, writes Sir Bernard Burke, “from the period of its desertion by its luckless master, Bulgaden Hall gradually sank into ruin; and to mark its site nought remains but the foundation walls and a solitary stone, bearing the family arms.”

A strange incident, of which, it is said, no satisfactory explanation has ever yet been forthcoming, happened during the wedding banquet of Alexander iii. at Jedburgh Castle, a weird and gruesome episode which Edgar Poe expanded into his “Masque of the Red Death.”  The story goes that in the midst of the festivities, a mysterious figure glided amongst the astonished guests—­tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head to foot in the habiliments of the grave, the mask which concealed the visage resembling the countenance of a stiffened corpse.

“Who dares,” demands the royal host, “to insult us with this blasphemous mockery?  Seize him and unmask him, that we may know whom we have to hang at sunrise from the battlements.”

But when the awe-struck revellers took courage and grasped the figure, “they gasped in unutterable horror on finding the grave cerements and corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness, untenanted by any tangible form, vanishing as suddenly as it had appeared.”  All sorts of theories have been suggested to account for this mysterious figure, but no satisfactory solution has been forthcoming, an incident of which, it may be remembered, Heywood has given a graphic picture: