The Widowed Bride — page 128: what you’re looking at

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

THE WIDOWED BRIDE. ES grave; but she was a skillful maneuverer, and she won first his attention, then his admiration, by the extravagant at- tachment she professed for the twin girls. Perhaps I judge the present Lady Glenhampton too severely. J never saw her but once, and then I took an instinctive dislike to her. But, at all events, she took the earl by storm. He thought she would prove a good mother to his little ones, and he married her, scarcely more than a year after his wife’s death. “TI don’t know what the modern idea of it may be,” said the rector, thoughtfully, putting the tips of his fingers to- gether, ‘but I call it a sort of legal bigamy when a man, still loving a dead wife, marries another woman from any motive of interest or expediency. I told Glenhampton so, plainly, when he consulted me about this second marriage; but what man ever takes advice when his mind is once made up? Circumstances have proved that I was not altogether wrong, for—but | am anticipating my story,” added the good man, catching at the broken threads of his narrative, as he might grasp at one of the falling books from his study table. ‘‘He married her, and the first change in his plans that she effected after she was Countess of Glenhampton was to persuade him that his health required a brief sojourn among the islands of the Mediterranean. He was ill, but his malady was not one which a southern climate, or the winds which blow over the orange groves of Sicily could ex- terminate. It wasa broken heart, not tubercled Iungs, which made his cheek pale and drew the dark hollows round his eyes. But a persistent woman can accomplish wonders, and to the Mediterranean they went. At the eleventh hour my lady discerned that the voyage would be too difficult and wearisome to the little ones, so they were left at home, in charge of trusted servants. Hartfield, the butler,—poor fellow, he is dead. and gone these ten years—has told me, many a time, with the tears in his honest eyes, of the part- ing between Lord Glenhampton and the little creatures, whom he dreamed so little that he was never to see again. My lady’s own child, by her first husband, was also left be- hind—a bright little boy of two or three years old—and it was just after the departure of the earl and the countess that I came to St. Hilda and assumed the temporary charge of the parish. J have somewhere among my old papers the letter Glenhampton wrote to me the night before he left England, commending, in terms of affecting entreaties, the (Eo) m comicbooks