Suddenly Selina started.
"Leave me, Edgardo! leave me! A mysterious something--a fatal misgiving--a dark ambiguity--an equivocal mistrust oppresses me.

I would be alone!" The young man arose, and cast a loving glance on the lady.

"Then we will be married on the seventeenth." "The seventeenth," repeated Selina, with a mysterious shudder.
They embraced and parted.

As the clatter of hoofs in the court-yard died away, the Lady Selina sank into the chair she had just quitted.
"The seventeenth," she repeated slowly, with the same fateful shudder.
"Ah!--what if he should know that I have another husband living?
Dare I reveal to him that I have two legitimate and three natural children?
Dare I repeat to him the history of my youth?
Dare I confess that at the age of seven I poisoned my sister, by putting verdigris in her cream-tarts,--that I threw my cousin from a swing at the age of twelve?
That the lady's-maid who incurred the displeasure of my girlhood now lies at the bottom of the horse-pond?
No! no! he is too pure,--too good,--too innocent, to hear such improper conversation!" and her whole body writhed as she rocked to and fro in a paroxysm of grief.
But she was soon calm.

Rising to her feet, she opened a secret panel in the wall, and revealed a slow-match ready for lighting.
"This match," said the Lady Selina, "is connected with a mine beneath the western tower, where my three children are confined; another branch of it lies under the parish church, where the record of my first marriage is kept.