Adelaide, at length, he offered his widowed heart. She came to his
lone house like the dove, bearing the olive branch of peace and
consolation. Their bridal was not one of revelry and mirth, for a sad
recollection brooded over the hour. Yet they lived happily; the
husband again smiled, and, with a new spring, the roses again
blossomed in their garden. But it seemed as if a fatality pursued this
singular man. When the rose withered and the leaf fell, in the mellow
autumn of the year, Adelaide, too, sickened and died, like her younger
sister, in the arms of her husband and of Madeleine.

"Perhaps you will think it strange, young man, that, after all, the
wretched survivor stood again at the altar. But he was a mysterious
being, whose ways were inscrutable, who, thirsting for domestic bliss,
was doomed ever to seek and never to find it. His third bride was
Madeleine. I well remember her. She was a beauty, in the true sense of
the word. It may seem strange to you to hear the praise of beauty from
such lips as mine; but I cannot help expatiating upon hers. She might
have sat upon a throne, and the most loyal subject, the proudest peer,
would have sworn the blood within her veins had descended from a
hundred kings. She was a proud creature, with a tall, commanding
form, and raven tresses, that floated, dark and cloud-like, over her
shoulders. She was a singularly-gifted woman, and possessed of rare
inspiration. She loved the widower for his power and his fame, and she
wedded him. They were married in that church. It was on a summer
afternoon--I recollect it well. During the ceremony, the blackest
cloud I ever saw overspread the heavens like a pall, and, at the
moment when the _third bride_ pronounced her vow, a clap of thunder
shook the building to the centre. All the females shrieked, but the
bride herself made the response with a steady voice, and her eyes
glittered with wild fire as she gazed upon her bridegroom. He remarked