waited for, they first hinted, and then expressed in plain terms, the wishes of their hearts.  For a time all their efforts were fruitless; but John Carr getting old and weak, wished to be succeeded in his business by George; and the wife, when she became a widow, would require to be maintained—­reasons which had more weight with Effie than any others, excepting always the act of George’s self-immolation at the shrine in which his fancy had placed her.  The importunities at length wore out her resistings, without effacing the lines of the old and still endeared image, and she gave a cold, we may say reluctant, consent.  The bride’s “ay” was a sigh, the rapture a tear of sadness.  But George was pleased even with this:  Effie, the long-cherished Effie, was at length his.

In her new situation, Effie Carr—­now Mrs. Lindsay—­performed all the duties of a good and faithful wife; by an effort of the will no doubt, though in another sense only a sad obedience to necessity, of which we are all, as the creatures of motives, the very slaves.  But the old image resisted the appeals of her reason, as well as the blandishments of a husband’s love.  She was only true, faithful, and kind, till the birth of a child lent its reconciling power to the efforts of duty.  Some time afterwards John Carr died—­an event which carried in its train the subsequent death of his wife.  There was left to the son-in-law a dwindling business, and a very small sum of money, for the father had met with misfortunes in his declining years, which impaired health prevented him from resisting.  Time wore on, and showed that the power of the martyr-spirit is not always that of the champion of worldly success, for it was now but a struggle between George Lindsay, with a stained name, and the stern demon of misfortune.  He was at length overtaken by poverty, which, as affecting Effie, preyed so relentlessly upon his spirits, that within two years he followed John Carr to the grave.  Effie was now left with two children to the work of her fingers, a poor weapon wherewith to beat off the wolf of want, and even this was curtailed by the effects of the old crime, which the public still kept in green remembrance.

Throughout, our story has been the sensationalism of angry fate, and even less likely to be believed than the work of fiction.  Nor was the vulture face of the Nemesis yet smoothed down.  The grief of her bereavement had only partially diverted Effie’s mind from the recollections of him who had ruined her, and yet could not be hated by her, nay, could not be but loved by her.  The sensitized nerve, which had received the old image, gave it out fresh again to the reviving power of memory, and this was only a continuation of what had been a corroding custom of years and years.  But, as the saying goes, it is a long road that does not offer by its side the spreading bough of shade to the way-worn traveller.  One day, when Effie was engaged with her work, of which she was as weary as of the dreaming which accompanied it, there appeared before her, without premonition or foreshadowing sign, Robert Stormonth of Kelton, dressed as a country gentleman, booted, and with a whip in his hand.