"'Married!' and as that word left my lips, it seemed as if my very life,
my very soul, had gushed forth also in the sound. When--oh! when, in the
night-watch and the daily yearning, when, whatever might have been my
grief or wretchedness, or despondency, when had I dreamt, when imaged
forth even the outline of a doom like this? Married! my Lucy, my fond,
my constant, my pure-hearted, and tender Lucy! Suddenly, all the chilled
and revolted energies of my passions seemed to re-act, and rush back
upon me. I seized that smiling and hollow wretch with a fierce grasp.
'You have done this--you have broken her heart--you have crushed mine! I
curse you in her name and my own!--I curse you from the bottom and with
all the venom of my soul!--Wretch! wretch! and he was as a reed in my
hands.'

"'Madman,' said he, as at last he extricated himself from my gripe, 'my
daughter married with her free consent, and to one far better fitted to
make her happy than you. Go, go--I forgive you--I also was once in love,
and with _her_ mother!'

"I did not answer--I let him depart.

"It was a little while after this interview--but I mention it now, for
there is no importance in the quarter from which I heard it--that I
learned some few particulars of Lucy's marriage. There was, and still
is, in the world's gossip, a strange story of a rich, foolish man, awed
as well as gulled by a sharper, and of a girl torn to a church with a
violence so evident that the priest refused the ceremony. But the rite
was afterwards solemnized by special license, in private, and at night.
The pith of that story has truth, and Lucy was at once the heroine and
victim of the romance. Now, then, I turn to somewhat a different strain