t hand.

He was turned out of her father's house with a red weal struck across
his face like a brand.

Of course he returned. The arrow was firmly fixed. He asked her to marry
him, and was refused with savage contempt. He would not take the
refusal. Her heart and ambition were hidden traitors to his cause. In
the end she surrendered and the marriage day was set.

Sir Austin rode away to set his house in order, while Desire turned from
alchemy to make her wedding garments.

The entries during this interval were sweetly gentle and feminine. Her
Rose of Jerusalem fragrance was all her own, and was kept so, but she
made less-rare essences and sold them through a pedlar in order to buy
fine linen and brocade for a trousseau not designed to be worn in a
Puritan village. She was happy and at rest in expectation.

On her wedding day the destroying news fell. Sir Austin hid a weak
spirit within a strong and handsome body. Away from Desire's glamour,
back in New York, he had not broken his engagement to the heiress.
Instead, he had married her on the day arranged before he met the
clergyman's daughter.

There was never again a connected record in the diary. Pages were torn
out in places, entries were broken off, half-made. But the story Vere's
slow, steady voice conveyed to us was the one we knew; the one my Desire
had told to me the first night I slept in this house. The half-mad girl
turned to her father's deadly books. Sir Austin died as his waxen image
dissolved before the fire, where the girl sat watching with merciless
hate. He died, raving and frothing, on her door-sill. She never saw him
after the day he rode away to prepare for their marriage. She set open
her window that she might hear his progress to that hard death, but
never deigned to turn her glance upon him.

The clergyman was dead, now; of shame, or perhaps of terror at the child
he had reared. The girl was alone.

The diary grew wilder, with gaps of weeks where there were no entries.
More frequently, pages were missing and paragraphs obliterated by the
reddish blotches like rust or blood. There were accounts of weird,
half-told experiments ranging through the three degrees of magic set
forth by Talmud and Cabala. She wrote of legions of kingdoms between
earth and heaven, and the twelve unearthly worlds of Plato. She alluded
to a Barrier between men and other orders of beings, beyond which dwelt
Those whom the magicians of old glimpsed after long toil an