RELICS OF POPULAR SUPERSTITIONS. 



97 



seemed sufficient to justify her lover's desertion. Many of the 

 hi^h-blooded and rigid old Welchmen swore they saw no wonder 

 in any perfidy committed by a man who could stoop to take up a 

 seared leaf when he might be himself the topmost branch of the 

 tree ; for David Gwynne was heir presumptive to Lillian's father, 

 and the sage gossips in the neighbourhood decreed that hermoth- 

 her was justly punished for contriving to ensnare him. All de- 

 clared no better fortune ought to attend a wedding-day appointed 

 when the bride's father lay on his death-bed ; and Lillian, who had 

 set out attended by " smiles, mouth-honour, and troops of friends," 

 returned forlorn and disconsolate, with all the blame usually heaped 

 on the unfortunate. Only two of the bridal procession returned 

 with her to her home, where her miserable mother received her 

 with clamorous and vulgar reproaches, made more bitter by her 

 own consciousness that she had half-caused this calamity. But 

 Idwal, who had never left Lillian's side during her journey, inter- 

 posed in her favour, not by arguments but by tears, which soften- 

 ed even her mother, whose love for her offspring was in propor- 

 tion to the fierceness of her uncultivated nature. Perhaps in this 

 moment of cruel disappointment, Maud would have been inclined 

 to offer the rejected bride to her first lover, if the shame and an- 

 guish in Lillian's eyes had not silenced her. And though an err- 

 ing and hard-browed woman, she understood the modest and sor- 

 rowful distance observed by Idwal, who possessed, notwithstanding 

 his dim intellects, that pride in pure blood which distinguishes 

 Wales. Night came, while Lillian, her mother, and her kins- 

 man, were still brooding over their affliction together, but without 

 any interchange of thought, when old Nicol Penmawl entered, 

 the only lawyer who found bread in the village. The poor girl 

 would have hidden herself, but he intimated that his visit con- 

 cerned her ; and after a preface which even his hard heart deemed 

 necessary, he explained, that David Gwynne would not fulfil his 

 promise of marriage to Lillian, unless her father signed an abso- 

 lute and entire deed of gift in his favour. She replied nothing, 

 and wept in agony ; while her mother burst into a furious invec- 

 tive against G Wynne's selfishness and treachery ; adding, that he 

 well knew how completely she might have shut him from his suc- 

 cession by obtaining a bequest of all to her daughter. 



" That is well said. Mistress Maud," said the man of law — " but 

 it behoves a crow to take care of his nest when a hen-sparrow has 

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