Frank and outspoken as a child, she acted as she felt, and did try on
the bridal dress, screaming with pleased delight when Valencia
fastened the veil and let its fleecy folds fall gracefully around her.
"I wonder what Arthur will think, I do so wish he was here," she had
said, ordering a hand-glass brought that she might see herself from
behind and know just how much her dress did trail, and how it looked
beneath the costly veil.
She was very beautiful in her bridal robes, and she kept them on till
Fanny began to chide her for her vanity, and, even then, she lingered
before the mirror, as if loath to take them off.
"I don't believe in presentiments," she said to Fanny; "but, do you
know, it seems to me just as if I should never wear this again," and
she smoothed thoughtfully the folds of the heavy silk she had just
laid upon the bed. "I don't know what can happen to prevent it, unless
Arthur should die. He was so pale last Sunday and seemed so weak that
I shuddered every time I looked at him. I mean to drive round there
this afternoon," she continued. "I suppose it is too cold for him to
venture as far as here, and he has no carriage, either."
She went to the parsonage that afternoon, and the women in the church
saw her as she drove by, the gorgeous colors of her carriage blanket
flashing in the wintry sunshine just as the diamonds flashed upon the
hand she waved gayly towards them.
There was a little too much of the lady patroness about her quite to
suit the plain Hanoverians, especially those who were neither high
enough or low enough to be honored with her notice, and they returned
to their wreathmaking and gossip, wondering under their breath if it
would not, on the whole, have been just as well if their clergyman had
married Anna Ruthven instead of this fine city girl with her Parisian
manners.
A gleam of intelligence shot from the gray eyes of Valencia, who was
in a most unreasonable mood.
"She did not like to stain her hands with the nasty hemlock more than
some other folks," she had said, when, after the trying on of the
bridal dress, Lucy had remonstrated with her for some duty neglected,
and then bidden her to go to the church and help if she were needed.
"I must certainly dismiss you," Lucy had said, wondering how Mrs.
Meredith had borne so long with the insolent girl, who went
unwillingly to the church, where she was at work when the carriage
drove by.
She had thought many times of the letter she had read, and, more than
once, when particularly angry, it had been upon her lips to tell her
mistress that she was not the first whom Mr. Leighton had asked to be
his wife, if, indeed, she was his choice at all; but there was
something in Lucy's manner which held her back; besides which, she
was, perhaps, unwilling to confess to her own meanness in reading the
stolen letter.