The Bride Elect: or, The Doom of the Double Roses — page 146: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE BRIDE ELECT. 137 She tore it open, and read with lightning speed each page. : A long and elaborate letter it must have been, for she went over it again and yet again, as if its meaning could - not pierce her slow brain; and she weighed each word and studied each word so long that the city of Golspie was far behind before my lady looked up from her Lowland news. And she gazed out over the sea, with eyes which burned like great lamps within some fragile porcelain vase, for her face was thin and whiter than the breast of each curling wave, and colder than the rocks which were washed by the beating surf and dried by the bitter wind from the north, and the moaning of a great desolation was burning like corpse-lights in those wild eyes. My lady strained her palfrey’s bridle with a vehemence which sent every silver bell jingling in merry company, and like an arrow she shot forward, with a terrible laugh, low and ominous, past the astonished laird leisurely trotting on ahead, and the dumfounded Robin, picking his way idly across a peat-morass, onward, fleetly and wildly, with a ter- rified horse, which spurred the turf in clods behind him, through the jagged whins and the sharp sand-pass to the edge of a high crag where the sea-gulls whirled in eddies, and the sand-martins built their nests, and the crawling foam shoaled into shiny caverns full fifty feet below. “Stop, stop, Kilmeny!” shouted Robin Strathmore, white with horror, and smiting his horse with desperate cruelty as he plunged helplessly deeper into the surging morass. “Fly father, fly! She’ll do it! Fly, for Heaven’s love!” | he cried. And the wily schemer of this family stood up in his stir- — rups, and looked at his niece struggling fiercely with her affrighted steed on the confines of the awful caldron, and grasping the sweet musical reins with angry hands, and scourging the animal as it reared shuddering. upon its haunches, and for a moment his face blanched as he thought perhaps he had drawn the strain with too sudden a hand on this wild scion of his blood. But he soon rallied, and rode over to help his son with a calm air of assurance. ‘“Whist, Robin!” he rejoined, seizing his horse by the bridle, and landing him upon a solid rock; ‘‘dinna fear, dinna fear. Yon lassie has got oure muckle grit to gang Gomichooks. co