Before my wedding-day came she was lying in the bare cemetery I had passed so often with a cold dread in my young and bounding heart.
"With her loss the one true and unselfish bond which held me to my lover was severed, and, unknown to him--( perhaps he hears it now for the first time)--I had many hours of secret hesitation which might have ended in a positive refusal to marry him if I had not been afraid of his anger and the consequences of an open break.

With all his protestations of affection and the very ardent love he made me, he had not succeeded in rousing my affections, but he had my fears.

I knew that to tell him to his face I would not marry him would mean death to him and possibly to myself.

Such intuition, young as I was, did I have of his character, though I comprehended so little the real range of his mind and the unswerving trend of his ambitious nature.
"So my, wedding-day came and we were united in the very hotel where I had so long served in a menial capacity.

The social distinctions in such a place being small and my birth and breeding really placing me on a par with my employer and his family, I was given the parlor for this celebration and never, never, shall I forget its mean and bare look, even to my untutored eyes; or how lonely those far hills looked, through the small-paned window I faced; or what a shadow seemed to fall across them as the parson uttered those fateful words, so terrible to one whose heart is not in them: What God hath joined together let no man put asunder.