An undefined dread took possession of her.  It seemed as though this happiness, that appeared so near, was yet to elude her.  A mirror stood where she could behold her own image.  A sadness stole over the girl’s spirit as she looked at the semblance of herself there reflected.  As she gazed, she seemed to be communing with some invisible presence, and she found herself pitying the young face in the mirror, as if it were another than her own.

While she looked sorrowfully, a second shadow became dimly outlined behind it.  Clemence started in momentary terror.  The thought occurred to her of the old-time superstition connected with this illusion.  She remembered that an old nurse had told her in childhood that it was an omen of death to behold this spectral shadow.  In spite of her freedom from vulgar superstition, her lips grew colorless, and her heart beat with alarm.  She sank down again into her chair, cowering close to the cheerful fire.

An hour passed thus.  The clock struck twelve.  The girl roused herself again at this—­remembered that this was to be the most eventful day of her existence.  “I must retire,” she soliloquized; “it will never do to have pale cheeks or troubled thoughts for my wedding day.  Would that I could make myself beautiful for his dear sake.”

A smile of hope and joy wreathed the lips of the soft-eyed dreamer.  She paced the floor absently backward and forward, with far-off gaze; then knelt at her bedside and breathed to the kind All Father a prayer for guidance and strength for what might come to her.

Clemence Graystone’s future seemed, for the first time since her father’s sudden death, to hold in it somewhat of happiness for her portion.  The dreary waste had changed to a smiling landscape, that glowed beneath skies of a roseate hue.  There was surely nothing now to fear.  With the love of one powerful to protect her from life’s ills, means to lavish upon the wistful-eyed child who had grown each day deeper into her affections, and a firm, trusting faith in the guidance of One who ruleth over the world He has created, a faith that had kept her from despair in the darkest hour, and made her young life beautiful; with hope beckoning, with smiling eyes, to the crowning glory of womanhood, this girl, who had suffered so much from fate, ought to have been content and happy.  But the mysterious shadow of her coming doom brooded darkly over her.

At length, inspired with a sudden feeling, for which she could hardly account, Clemence rose, and seated herself at her writing-desk.  If she had been given to spiritual sympathies, she would have said that her hand was controlled by some unseen power.  As it was, there was a look of awe upon the pallid face that bent to the task, and the girl was whiter than the paper before her, as she wrote thus: 

     MY DEAREST FRIEND:  Something within me, a strange, mysterious
     influence, the whisperings, perhaps, of some angel spirit sent to
     call me hence, impels me to write these few words of farewell.