"If you please, marm, the man from York State is comin' afoot. Too stingy to ride, I'll warrant," and Janet, the housekeeper¹, disappeared from the parlor², just as the sound of the gate was heard, and an unusually fine-looking middle-aged³ man was seen coming up the box-lined walk which led to the cottage door.

 

The person thus addressed was a lady, whose face, though young and handsome, wore a look which told of early sorrow. Matilda Remington had been a happy, loving wife, but the old churchyard in Vernon contained a grass-grown grave, where rested the noble heart which had won her girlish love. And she was a widow now, a fair-haired, blue-eyed widow, and the stranger who had so excited Janet's wrath⁴ by walking from the depot⁵, a distance of three miles, would claim her as his bride ere the morrow's sun was midway in the heavens. How the engagement happened she could not exactly tell, but happened it had, and she was pledged to leave the vine-wreathed cottage which Harry⁶ had built for her, and go with one of whom she knew comparatively little.

 

Six months before our story opens she had spent a few days with him at the house of a mutual⁷ friend in an adjoining State, and since that time they had written to each other regularly, the correspondence resulting at last in an engagement, which he had now come to fulfill⁸. He had never visited her before in her own home, consequently she was wholly unacquainted with his disposition⁹ or peculiarities¹⁰. He was intelligent and refined, commanding in appearance, and agreeable in manner whenever he chose to be, and when he wrote to her of his home, which he said would be a second Paradise were she its mistress, when he

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