So the young bride, with a sigh, reluctantly resigned all hope of seeing her unworthy "friend" before sailing for Europe.
Early the next morning the newly-married pair took the steamboat for Washington, where in due time they safely arrived, and whence they took the train for the North.
They reached New York on Thursday night, had one intervening day to see something of the city and to make some few last purchases for their voyage, and on Saturday at noon they embarked on the magnificent ocean steamship "Pekin," bound from New York to Southampton.
We must leave them on board their ship, and return and look up Mary Grey.
After Mrs. Grey's last interview with Alden Lytton, during which, partly because she lost her self-command and partly because she did not care longer to conceal her feelings, she had thrown off her mask, she sat down to review the situation.
"Well, I have betrayed myself," she mused. "I have let him see how I really feel about this marriage engagement between him and Emma Cavendish. He knows now how I loved him; if he has eyes in his head he sees now how I hate him.
"All right. I have now no further reason to deceive him. He has served my utmost purpose for his own and her own destruction. I no longer need his unconscious co-operation. I have his honor and his liberty, and her reputation and peace, in my power and at my mercy.
"And I have done all this myself, without the voluntary help of any human being. I have used men as the mechanic uses tools, making them do his work, or as the potter uses clay, molding it to his purpose.
"Let him marry Emma Cavendish. I can part them at any moment afterward and throw them into a felon's prison, and cast her down from her proud place into misery and degradation.
"I _could_ stop their marriage now, or at the altar. But I will not do that; for to do that would be only to disappoint or grieve them. But my vengeance must strike a deeper blow. It must degrade and ruin them. I will wait until they have been married some time. Then, in the hour of their fancied security, I will come down upon them like an avalanche of destruction."
In the feverish excitement of anticipating this fiendish consummation of her revenge she almost forgot her heinous crime, and ceased to be haunted by the hideous specter of her murdered lover.