With him once more at her side, listening to his fascinating tones, she felt that she was in little danger of making too great a sacrifice for him; she reproached herself that she had ever faltered. Still she felt guilty and unsafe, startled at every new entrance; and it was with an emotion of dread that she glanced toward the stranger, whose observation had been so oppressive to her. But her eye brightened with an expression of relief as it caught the wave of her black garments passing into another car.
After a long, long ride of nearly forty-eight hours, they stopped.
“Oh! how far I am from dear, quiet Vernon, in this great, strange city!” thought Clara. But her heart fluttered as she heard Brentford order the hackman to “drive to —— church.”
“You shall be mine before we rest,” he whispered to her. Before another hour had passed, the solemn, irrevocable words were spoken which sealed her destiny! She felt their momentous import as she never had before.
A little group of loiterers in the vestibule gazed curiously at them as they passed out, and behind them Clara saw the same black eye that had annoyed her so much on the journey. Why should she be there, in the sultry noon, from the dust and weariness of travel?
——
CHAPTER IX.
That same afternoon the bride sat alone in her room in a fashionable hotel. A tap at her door—it is that stranger of the black eye and mourning dress. Though amazed and not altogether pleased, Clara invited her to a seat.
“I think, ma’am, you were married this morning in —— church, to Mr. Bernal Brentford?”
Clara assented, with a faint blush.