“I do not care about the money. I could be happy with Cecil in a cabin!”
“Poor Violet! And yet, as surely as you live, grandpapa will make you marry the other man!”
“Never!” cried Violet, with heaving bosom and flashing eyes. “No man but Cecil Grant shall ever call me wife. Grandpapa might force me to the altar with this hated stranger, but I should take poison and fall down dead at his feet before his ring was on my hand, like the heroine of Ralph Washburn Chainey’s beautiful poem, ‘A Broken Marriage.’”
“What did she do?” inquired Amber, who had not read the verses.
“Let me read the lines for you,” Violet answered, taking up a magazine from the onyx table by her side. She opened it and began to read aloud, in a low voice, freighted with the fullness of a sorrowful heart:
A BROKEN MARRIAGE.
“Stop the service! Still the singing!
Smile no more, but bow the head!
For the bride, so young and winning,
Lies before the chancel, dead.