The bridal day dawned, once more, for the heiress of Lone.
Salome, with her attendant, was up early. The young girl, since her departure from Lone Castle, the scene of her father's murder, and her arrival at Elmhurst House, and occupations with her wedding preparations, had wonderfully recovered her health and spirits.
Yet on this, her bridal day, she arose with a heavy heart. A vague dread of impending evil weighed upon her spirits.
This occasion might well have brought back vividly cruelly to her memory, that fatal bridal morn when, going to invoke her father's presence and blessing on her marriage, she found him lying stiff and stark in the crimson pool of his own curdled blood. She had no father here on earth, now, to give her to the man she loved, and to bless her union with him.
That, in itself might have been enough to account for the gloom that darkened her wedding day. But that was not all. For, though her father was not visibly present here on earth, she knew that he watched and blessed her from his eternal home. No! but her prophetic soul was darkened by the shadow of some approaching misfortune.
Margaret, her new maid, brought her a cup of coffee in her chamber. After she had drank it, she went sadly in her dressing-room, to make her toilet for the altar.
Margaret was her only attendant and dresser.
Salome was still in the deepest mourning for her murdered father. In leaving it off, for the marriage altar only, she had resolved to replace it only by such a simple dress as might have been worn by any portionless bride in the middle class of society.
She wore a plain white tulle dress, over a lustreless white silk, an Illusion vail, a wreath of orange buds, and white kid gloves and gaiters. She wore no jewels of any sort.
Her bridesmaids, only two in number, were dressed like herself, except that they wore no vails, and that their wreaths were of white rose buds.