CHAPTER VIII.

BEFORE THE MARRIAGE.


The wedding guests were assembled. Madame Bugeaud had just put the
veil upon the head of her daughter Margaret, and impressed upon her
forehead the last kiss of motherly love. It was the hour when a
mother holds her daughter as a child in her arms for the last time,
bids adieu to the pleasant pictures of the past, and sends her child
from her parents' house to go out into the world and seek a new
home. Painful always is such an hour to a mother's heart, for the
future is uncertain; no one knows any thing about the new
vicissitudes that may arise.

And painful, too, to the wife of Councillor Bugeaud was this parting
from her dearly-loved daughter, but she suppressed her deep emotion,
restrained the tears in her heart, that not one should fall upon the
bridal wreath of her loved daughter. Tears dropped upon the bridal
wreath are the heralds of coming misfortune, the seal of pain which
destiny stamps upon the brow of the doomed one.

And the tender mother would so gladly have taken away from her loved
Margaret every pain and every misfortune! The times were
threatening, and the horizon of the present was so full of stormy
signs that it was necessary to look into the future with hope.

"Go, my daughter," said Madame Bugeaud, with a smile, regarding