the woman who, till then, had been the ideal of his
soul, and that she had substituted her veiled sister Anne for herself
at the altar. The remainder of this strange affair is briefly
told:--George Evans had one, and only one, interview with his wife,
and thus addressed her in the following words: "Madam, you have
attained your end. I need not say how you bear my name; and, for the
sake of your family, I acknowledge you as my wife. You shall receive
an income from me suitable to your situation. This, probably, is all
you cared for with regard to me, and you and I shall meet no more in
this world."

[Illustration: "MADAM, YOU HAVE ATTAINED YOUR END. YOU AND I SHALL
MEET NO MORE IN THIS WORLD."]

He would allow no explanation, and almost immediately left his home
and country, never to meet again the woman who had so basely betrayed
him. The glory of Bulgaden Hall was gone. Its young master, in order
to quench his sorrow and bury his disgust, gave way to every kind of
dissipation, and died its victim in 1769. And, writes Sir Bernard
Burke, "from the period of its desertion by its luckless master,
Bulgaden Hall gradually sank into ruin; and to mark its site nought
remains but the foundation walls and a solitary stone, bearing the
family arms."

A strange incident, of which, it is said, no satisfactory explanation
has ever yet been forthcoming, happened during the wedding banquet of
Alexander III. at Jedburgh Castle, a weird and gruesome episode which
Edgar Poe expanded into his "Masque of the Red Death." The story goes
that in the midst of the festivities, a mysterious figure glided
amongst the astonished guests--tall and gaunt, and shrouded from head
to foot in the habiliments of the grave, the mask which concealed the
visage resembling the countenance of a stiffened corpse.

"Who dares," demands the royal host, "to insult us with this
blasphemous mockery? Seize him and unmask him, that we may know whom
we have to hang at sunrise from the battlements."

But when the awe-struck revellers took courage and grasped the figure,
"they gasped in unutterable horror on finding the grave cerements and
corpse-like mask, which they handled with so violent a rudeness,
untenanted by any tangible form, vanishing as suddenly as it had
appeared." All sorts of theories have been suggested to account for
this mysterious figure, but no satisfactory solution has been
forthcoming, an incident of which, it may be remembered, Heywood has
g