“No, no—he is”—began Ernest Noel quickly, but at that moment the red-headed policeman trotted on the scene with a bewildered air, awakening such instant fierce resentment in his breast that he sprang at him, exclaiming hotly:
“You red-headed villain, you are the cause of all this trouble! I should like to throttle you!”
Whereupon the indignant officer raised his club and brought it down on the cranium of the hot-headed young man with such telling effect that he was quite stunned, and fell an easy victim to arrest, being removed in an ambulance to the station house, while his poor friend, whose identity was equally unknown, was taken to Bellevue Hospital.
What an ending to a day that had been anticipated for months with the ardor of a true lover. Instead of wedding bells the slow procession to the grave, and now—far from the festal scene, alone among strangers who did not suspect his identity with the young millionaire Frank Laurier, terribly injured, perhaps unto death, how strange and sad a fate!
And the bride—poor girl!—so beautiful, so proud, so imperious, who can picture the depths of her pain and humiliation, waiting more than an hour at the thronged, fashionable church for a laggard bridegroom who never came, who sent no excuse, who left her to suffer under one of the cruelest blows woman’s heart can bear—forsaken at the altar!
She was taken home again by her relatives, a pallid, wild-eyed, half-frantic girl, vowing bitterest vengeance on her recreant lover as she stripped the bridal veil from her dark, queenly head, and tramped it angrily beneath her feet.
“Thus I trample on the past, on all the love I bore him, and vow myself to vengeance!” she cried madly, to her cousin, Mrs. van Dorn, whose eyes filled with sympathetic tears as she cried:
“It is a cruel blow, dear Cora, but do not be too rash in your anger. Perhaps something happened to prevent Frank’s coming and everything may yet be explained to your satisfaction.”
But her consoling words rang hollow in her own ears, for she thought:
“I had a presentiment of this on the way to the church. I felt certain that he would fail to meet Cora there. Oh, it was very cruel in him to wound the poor girl so. It is a disgrace that will cling to a girl through life, being jilted at the altar. How much kinder it would have been to break with her sooner and avoid a public exposé like the painful one we have had to-day. I feel almost as indignant as Cora at the slight put on our family!”