After a hundred mistakes, a hundred disappointments, he came to a standstill perforce. Floundering through a deep snow-drift, he was compelled to halt and take a survey of the misty surface, over which every passing moment made it more unsafe to travel. The storm, that had raged and lulled at intervals, now lifted for a time, disclosing at a hundred paces' distance something that caused Fin to start in his saddle, and brought a blasphemy of malice and exultation to his lips.
Yonder, almost within pistol-shot, lay a motionless heap half buried, half revealed, and yes, his keen hawk's eye did not deceive him, a horseman's heavy boot protruded from the snow!
With a cry of triumph he spurred eagerly to the spot, and leaped from the saddle in such fierce and hungry hate as impels the pounce of a wild cat—the swoop of a bird of prey.
THE GIPSY'S BRIDE.
She lay dead—stone dead. The girl he had loved all these years. The woman that to-day, this very day was to have been his wife! And he thought it was John Garnet, whose life he had thirsted to take for a reward of twenty
guineas. Twenty guineas to spend in rioting and drunkenness at his wedding feast! He burst into so wild a shriek of laughter as startled the very horse, from which he had dismounted, and fell on his knees beside the rigid form, that he had last seen warm and supple, clothed with living grace and beauty in his tent.
It seemed impossible. She had not surely lain there many minutes, and yet how stiff she had grown and cold! Against that fixed grey face he laid his own, and tried hard in his agony to breathe life into those pale parted lips, but it was hoping against hope, and while he swore that it could not, should not be, his bursting heart told him the truth, and he knew that Thyra Lovel's deep dark eyes would look on him again, gladly or sadly, never more! Even in his utter misery he saw it all: the ingenious shift, the false track, the artifice by which she had outwitted him, and led him skilfully off the line of his pursuit, to spend his wedding-day with her here, locked in each other's arms, the only occupants of the frozen, desolate waste.
The gipsy's mood was very pitiful and tender while he sat and watched by her corpse in the falling snow, waiting till his horse should be sufficiently rested to carry a double burthen, thinking, more in sorrow than in anger, of their two blighted lives, and the love he had given so lavishly without return, wondering in his heathen reasonings why these things were so, wishing in his despair that the storm would fall thicker and thicker to wrap them for ever on this their marriage-bed in its shroud of eternal white.