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The Doctor's Daughter

by Vera · English · Gutenberg #6809 · 511,090 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Doctor's Daughter

Author: Vera


        
Release date: November 1, 2004 [eBook #6809]
                Most recently updated: March 12, 2014

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Yvonne Dailey, Juliet Sutherland, Charles
        Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. This
        file was produced from images generously made available
        by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions.
        HTML version by Al Haines.


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE DOCTOR'S DAUGHTER ***




Produced by Yvonne Dailey, Juliet Sutherland, Charles
Franks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team. This
file was produced from images generously made available
by the Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions.
HTML version by Al Haines.










THE DOCTOR'S DAUGHTER.

BY "VERA."

AUTHOR OF "HONOR EDGEWORTH"



"_O Tempora! O Mores!_"




PREFACE.

Charles Dickens observes with much truth, that "though seldom read,
prefaces are continually written." It may be asked and even wondered,
why? I cannot say that I know the exact reason, but it seems to me
that they may carry the same weight, in the literary world, that
certain _sotto voce_ explanations, which oftentimes accompany the
introduction of one person to another, do in the social world.

If it is permitted, in bringing some quaint, old-fashioned little
body, before a gathering of your more fastidious friends, at once to
reconcile them to his or her strange, ungainly mien, and to justify
yourself for acknowledging an intimacy with so eccentric a creature,
by following up the prosy and unsuggestive: "Mr. B----, ladies and
gentlemen," or "Miss M----, ladies and gentlemen," with such a
refreshing paraphrase as, "brother-in-law of the celebrated Lord
Marmaduke Pulsifer," or, "confidential companion, to the wife of the
late distinguished Christopher Quill the American Poet"--why should
not a like privilege be extended the labour-worn author, when he
ushers the crude and unattractive offspring of his own undaunted
energy into the arena of literary life?

Mr. B----, without the whispered guarantee of his relative importance,
would never be noticed unless to be riled or ridiculed; and so with
many a meek and modest volume, whose key-note has never been sounded,
or if sounded has never been heard.

We would all be perfect in our attributes if we could! Who would write
vapid, savourless pages, if it were in his power to set them aglow
with rare erudition, and dazzling conceptions of ethical and other
abstract subjects? If I had been born a Dickens, _lector benevole_, I
would have willingly, eagerly, proudly, favoured you with a "Tale of
Two Cities" or a "David Copperfield;" of that you may be morally
certain, however, it is no mock self-disparagement (!) that moves me
to humbly acknowledge (!) my inferiority to this immortal mind. I have
availed myself of the only alternative left, when I recognized the
impossibility of rivalling this protagonist among the _dramatis
personae_ of the great Drama of English Fiction, and have done
something of which he speaks very tenderly and delicately somewhere in
his prolific writings, one's "best." He says, "one man's best is as
good as another man's," not in its results, (I know by experience),
but in the abstract relationship which exists between the nature of
the two efforts, and I am grateful to him for having thus provided
against the possible discouragement of "small authorship."

In the subjoining pages, I offer to the world, a pretenseless record
of the impressions, opinions, and convictions which have been, I may
say, thrust upon me by a contact, which is yet necessarily limited,
with the phases of every-day life.

That some of these reflections and conclusions should not meet with
universal sympathy or approval, is not at all to be wondered at, when
we consider how much more different, than alike, are any two human
lives and lots. I do not ask my readers to subscribe to those tenets
and opinions which may seem unreal and exaggerated to them, because of
their different experience; I can only justify them in myself, by
declaring them to be the outgrowth of my own personal speculations in
the market of commonplace existence.

It has been my pleasure to probe under the surface of sorrow and song
that makes the swelling, restless tide of human passions a strange and
tempting mystery, even to itself; and though my pen may have failed to
carry out the deep-rooted ambition of my soul, there is some comfort
in the thought that I have made an effort; I have tried my young
wings, with the hope of soaring upward: if they are yet too feeble to
bear me, I am no more than the young eagle, and must rise again from
my fall, to await a gathering confidence and strength that may, or may
not, be in store for me.

A little mouse presumed to be the deliverer of a mighty lion, when
this noble beast lay ensnared and entangled in a net; it was slow and
tiresome work for the tiny benefactor to nibble now here, now there,
wherever its small teeth could find a vulnerable or yielding spot: but
a determination and decision of purpose, coupled with an undaunted and
fearless perseverance, have given issue time and again to achievements
even greater, though still less promising, than the undertaking of the
little mouse in the fable, but for those who can yet take heart, in
the face of possible failure, I think half the battle is won.

In introducing a second effort to the public, I feel called upon to
avail myself of the opportunity it affords me, of thanking many
readers for the kindness and consideration extended to my first. It
was kind of them to have dwelt at length upon its few redeeming
traits, and to have touched lightly and gently upon the cruder and
more faulty ones; it was kind of them to have taken into account every
circumstance which had any bearing upon the nature of the work: to
have alluded to the youth and inexperience of the writer. It was kind,
even of those who took it upon themselves to aver, not in the hearing
of the authoress herself, but elsewhere, that the composition was far
from being original. This latter verdict would have been the highest
tribute of all to the talent and erudition of the authoress, had they
who uttered it been capable or responsible judges of literary merit.
Being of that class, instead, who feel it urgent upon them to say
something, however garrulous or silly, when a local topic agitates
their immediate sphere, the authoress has not much reason for hoping
that their intention was really to flatter her maiden effort, by
purposely mistaking it for the work of an older, and abler hero of the
quill; however, if it might have been worthy of a maturer mind and
more powerful pen, in their eyes, a high compliment is necessarily
insinuated, even there, for the humble writer.

If the present story can lighten the burden of an idle hour of
sickness or sorrow; if it may shorten the time of waiting, or distract
the monotony of travel; if it may strike a key-note of common sympathy
between its author and its reader, where the shallow side of nature is
regretfully touched upon; if it may attract the potent attention of
even one of those whose words and actions regulate the tone and tenor
of our social life, to the urgency of encouraging, promoting and
favouring the principles of an active Christian morality, whose beauty
lies, not in the depths or vastness of its abstract conceptions, but
in its earnest, humble, and tireless labours for the advancement of
men's spiritual and temporal welfare--if it may do any one of these
things, it shall have more than realized the fond and fervent wish of
the author's heart: it shall have reaped her a golden harvest for the
tiresome task she has just accomplished, and shall have stimulated
anew her every energy, to associate itself more strongly and ardently
than ever, with the cause which struggles for men's freedom from the
fetters of a sordid and tyrant worldliness.




CHAPTER I.


Five-and-thirty years ago, before many of my fair young readers were
inflicted with the burdens of life, there came into this great world,
under the most ordinary and unpretending circumstances, a helpless
little baby girl: a dear, chubby, little thing, who at that moment, if
never afterwards in the long and intricate course of her mortal
career, looked every jot as interesting and as promising of a possible
extraordinary destiny as did the little being who, some years before
that, opened her eyes for the first time upon the elegant surroundings
of a chamber in Kensington Palace; and neither the Princess Louise of
Sachsen-Koburg, nor Edward the Duke of Kent, were any more elated or
gratified over the grand event which came into their lives on the
twenty-fourth of May, in the year of Our Lord 1819, than Amey and
Alfred Hampden were on the eighth of December, 185-, at the advent of
this little stranger into their humble home. Buried in baby finery,
this unsuspecting new-comer slumbered contentedly in a dainty cot. The
room was silent and darkened, the bright morning sunshine being shut
out by the heavy curtains which were carefully drawn across the
window: there was a ring of rare contentment in the crackle and purr
of the wood-stove, that filled a remote corner of the room with its
comfortable presence: and the sustaining spirit of wedded love, was as
pronouncedly omnipresent as befitted the interesting occasion.

Thus, so far as the eye of those who prognosticate from existing
circumstances could see, there was every prospect of comfort and
happiness in the dawning future, for this passive little bundle of
humanity lying in state in her neatly furnished basket-cradle; whether
it pleased his reverence Father Time, or not, to subscribe thus
obligingly to the wishes of a concerned few, is a secret which my pen
can best tell.

So strangely do the destinies of men and women resolve themselves out
of every day circumstances, that philosophers and moralists, with
their choicest erudition, are ofttimes puzzled over the solution of a
mysteriously chequered life, which they will not allow was guided by
the most natural and common-place accidents of existence.

That there are certain premises, from which the tenor of a yet unlived
life can be more or less accurately anticipated, no one will deny.
There are certain surroundings, certain particular circumstances,
that, from time immemorial have never failed to produce certain
infallible results; but, these abnormal pauses, and unforeseen
interruptions, that, time and again, have made of human lives the very
thing against which appearances were guarding them, are, it may be
providentially, held outside of the range of man's moral vision, and
screen themselves in ambush along either side of the seemingly smooth
vista, that spans the interval for certain individual human lives,
between time and eternity.

Such a high-sounding title as predestination, seems to lose much of
its potent charm when we take an interesting existence into our hands,
to dissect it, and analyse it, and reduce it to a rational origin.
Like decades of heterogeneous pearls, a human career with all its
varied details, glides through the fingers of the moral anatomist,
each fraction standing out by itself, suggesting its own real or
relative importance, yet associating itself ever with the rest, making
of the whole a more or less intricate, and, at best, a very uneven
chain.

When we consider that all the bewildering throng around and about us
have evolved into their present conditions of misery or joy from a
passive and innocent babyhood, we are mystified and awe-stricken;
there is so much inequality among the lots and portions of the
children of men, that it comes strangely home to us in our reverie, to
realize that the starting-point is, for one and all, the great and the
lowly, one and the same.

In its cradle, or on its mother's breast, the human creature knows no
special individuality, but when the rails of the cradle have been
climbed over, and the first foot-print stamped unaided upon the "sands
of time," a distinct personality has been established, which is the
embodiment of possible, probable, or uncertain influences--a
personality which grows and thrives upon internal stimulants
administered by an expanding mind and heart, and which leans almost
entirely for support upon the external accidents of fate or fortune
that may come in its way.

Were we as thoroughly penetrated with this conviction as we should be,
how different would be the issues of many human careers? Could we
accustom ourselves to meditate upon this truth as seriously as we
would upon a religious one, to examine our conscience from it as from
a reliable standpoint every day of our lives, what a flood of sympathy
and Christian charity would be let loose upon the social world from
converted hearts?

When men and women will thoroughly understand the strange and intimate
frame-work of human society, the wail of the pessimist will be soothed
and hushed forever: for then will they realize how dependent we poor
mortals are upon each other for sorrows or joys: then will it be plain
to them that no human life, however obscure, however trifling, is an
unfeeling thing, apart from every other, outside the daily contact of
every other.

Ah! we think, that God's creation, in all its grandeur and unrivalled
beauty, would be little worth, to a creature born to live and enjoy it
alone: and the infinite Wisdom decreed otherwise, when it gave unto
man a friend and companion in the first moments of his existence; but
is the world less desolate, less empty to a million hearts, because a
million others inhabit it as well? Has God's original intention
concerning the mutual love and companionship of His creatures,
survived unto the present day? I think the record of each reader's
large or small experience will answer this question for him eagerly
enough.

That these preliminary reflections should be the outgrowth of such an
ordinary event as the coming of a new baby into the already crowded
world may seem extravagant in more ways than one: but my object, as
the reader will see, is only to remind the forgetful majority, that
there are necessarily many reasons why men and women who have had a
common starting-point in life, should find themselves ere long at such
different goals.

I would suggest to them to consider the essential impressionability of
the human heart, especially in its period of early development, to
examine the nature of every external influence that weighs upon it,
and if the innocence of childhood has been recklessly forfeited with
time, to reserve their judgment until every aspect of the
circumstances has been impartially viewed.

I do not deny that the cradle in which I passed the first hours of
comfort and ease I have ever known, was rocked by a hand as loving as
that which rested caressingly upon the royal brow of the baby
Victoria. From the very first I was a peculiarly situated child,
surrounded by many comforts of which the majority of well-born
children are deprived, and deprived of many comforts by which
lowly-born children are surrounded. I was happiest when I was too
young to distinguish between pleasure and pain, and, as it were to
provide for the emptiness of much of my after life, destiny willed
that my memory should be the strongest and most comforting faculty of
my soul.

My mother died when I was but a few days old, and thus it is that I
have never known the real love or care of a true parent. Before I had
celebrated my third birthday there was another Mrs. Hampden presiding
over our household, but she was not my mother. This I never learned as
a direct fact, in simple words, until I had grown older; but there is
another channel through which truths of this sorrowful nature
oftentimes find their way: strange suspicions were creeping by degrees
into my heart, which with time gained great headway, and resolved
themselves into a questioning doubt, whether there had not been a day
when another, and a kinder face bent over my little cot, and smiled
upon me with a sweetness that did not chill and estrange me from it.

I had never been told in simple words, that my own mother lay under
one of those tall silent tombstones in the graveyard, where old
Hannah, our tried and trustworthy servant, was wont to go at times and
pray. No one had whispered to me that my father's second wife was, by
right, a stranger to the most sacred affections of my young soul, but
I learned the truth by myself.

When my growing heart began to seek and ask for the tender, patient
solicitude, which is to the child what the light and heat of the
summer sun are to the frailest tendril, no answer came to my mute
appeal. My little weaknesses and childish errors were never met with
that enduring forbearance which is the distinctive outgrowth of a
loving maternity. My trifling joys were rarely smiled upon, my petty
sorrows never shared nor soothed by that unsympathetic guardian of my
youth, and so I grew up by myself in a strange sort of isolation,
alienated in heart and spirit from those with whom of necessity I came
in daily contact.

And yet in many ways, my fathers' wife bestowed both care and
consideration upon me. My physical necessities were ever becomingly
attended to. I was allowed to sit at the table with her, which
privilege suggested no lack of substantial and dainty provisions, and
my governess was an accomplished and very discreet lady, whom my
step-mother secured after much trouble and worry; but here the limit
was drawn to her self-imposed duties; having done this much she rested
satisfied that she had so far outstepped the obligations of her
neutral position.

When I look back upon this period from the observatory of to-day, I
can afford to be more impartial in my judgments than I was in my youth
and immaturity. I know now, that my father's second wife was naturally
one of those selfish, narrow-hearted women, who never go outside of
their personal lot to taste or give pleasure. She had not the faintest
conception of what the cravings or desires of a truly sensitive nature
may be, and therefore knew nothing of the possible consequences of the
cold and unfeeling neglect with which my young life was blighted.

And even, had anyone told her, that her every word and action were
calculated to make a deep-rooted impression upon me, she would have
shrugged her shoulders pettishly, I doubt not, and declared that it
was "not her fault," that "some people were enough to provoke a
saint."

This was the woman whom the learned Doctor Hampden brought home to
conduct his household. He had found her under the gas-light at a
fashionable gathering, and was taken with her, he hardly knew why. She
was not very handsome, nor very winning, and certainly, not very
clever, but her family was a rare and tender off-shoot from an
unquestionably ancient and time-honored aristocracy, and, in
consequence, she carried her head high enough above the ordinary
social level, to have attracted a still more potent attention than Dr.
Hampden's.

I have heard that many a brow was arched in questioning surprise, when
the engagement was formally announced, and that nothing but the
ripening years of the prospective bride could have reconciled her more
sympathetic friends who belonged to that class of curious meddlers
that infest every society from pole to pole.

My father was undoubtedly a gentleman, and this was most
condescendingly admitted by his wife's fastidious coterie. A gentleman
by birth, by instinct, in dress, manners, taste, profession, and
general bearing. Moreover, he was a gentleman of social and political
influence, whose name had crept into journals and newspapers of
popular fame: in other words, he was one of "the men" of his day, with
a voice upon all public matters that agitated his immediate sphere.
Wherever he went, he was a gentleman of consequence, and carried no
mean individuality with him: he was that sort of a man one expects to
find married and settled in life, though here conjecture about him
must begin and end.

There are not a few men of his stamp in the world, and the reader I
doubt not has met them as frequently as I have myself. Sometimes they
are pillars of the state, leaders of political parties, with their
heads full of abstract calculations and wonderful statistics. Again
they are scientists, of a more or less exalted standing, artists,
antiquarians, agnostics, and undertakers, and they are all harmless,
respectable Benedicts, you know it without being told. You conclude it
from instinctively suggested premises, and yet in resting at such an
important conclusion nothing could have persuaded you to halt at the
every day, half-way house of courtship.

These men impress their fellow-men with the strange belief that
matrimony was for them a pre-ordained, forechosen vocation, a thing to
be done systematically according to reasons and rules, and the trivial
mind that would fain dwell upon a time in such methodical lives, when
heart predominated over head must apologize to the world of sentiment
and pass on to some less sensitive point of consideration.

My father, as I have said, was quite a consequential individual, his
very white, and very stiff, and very shining shirt-front insinuated as
much; his satiny black broadcloth confirmed it, and even the little
silk guard, that rested consciously upon his immaculate linen,
sustained the presumption. But for those and a few other reasons, he
was looked upon as a man of rigid method and severe discipline, a man
outside the grasp of ordinary human susceptibility, or, in more
familiar terms, a man "without a heart."

I remember, on one particular occasion, when the oft-ruffled serenity
of my step-mother's temperament was wonderfully agitated, that she
reproached him most touchingly for the utter absence of this tender,
palpitating organ; and turning towards her with a smile of the
blandest amusement, he explained to her, in a tone of remonstrative
sarcasm, laying two rigid fingers of one hand argumentatively in the
open palm of the other, "that no man could live without a heart," that
it was an essential element of existence, that its professional name
was derived from the Latin _cor_ or _cordis_, that it was "the great
central organ of circulation, with its base directed backward towards
the spine, and its point, forward and downward, towards the left side,
and that at each contraction it would be felt striking between the
fifth and sixth ribs about four inches from the medium line." "So you
see, my dear," he concluded calmly and coldly, "that you talk
nonsense, when you say I have no heart." That was my father's
disposition; to suspect that any one, or anything else could hope for
the privilege of making his heart beat, except this natural physical
contraction, were a vain and empty surmise indeed. And yet he had been
twice married; the question may suggest itself, had he ever loved? I
dare say he had analysed his amative propensity thoroughly, and knew
to what extent it existed within him, but when a man can reconcile
himself to the belief that on the "middle line of the skull, at the
back part of his head, there is a long projection, below which, and
between two similar protuberances, is his Organ of amativeness," or
that by which he learns "the lesson of life, the sad, sad lesson of
loving," methinks he is not outraged by a public opinion which casts
him down in disgust from the pedestal of respectable humanity, and
this option I will leave to the reader, even though the subject in
this instance be my own parent.

Whether his second wife, and the only Mrs. Hampden with whom we shall
have to deal, was disappointed in her expectations of her husband, or
not, is a something which I could only suspect, or at most, arrive at
from the indications of appearances, as I am entirely ignorant of what
the nature of such expectations may have been.

The domestic atmosphere of our home was apparently healthy, and
untroubled by foreign or unpleasant elements; our surroundings were
apparently comfortable, and the family apparently satisfied. What more
could be desired? Critics complain of the indiscreet writer, who
raises the thick impenetrable veil, which is supposed to screen a
domestic, political or social grievance from the common eye of all
three conditions. Even he who makes a little rend, with his own pen,
for his own ambition's sake, is not pardoned, and so if every picture
which the world holds up to view, presents a fair and brilliant
surface, whose business may it be to ask in an insinuating tone,
whether the other side is just as enchanting or not?

If the world insists upon calling an apparently happy home, happy in
reality, then ours was indisputably so, but the world and I have long
since ceased to agree upon matters of such a nature.

My father was married for some time to his second wife before any
material change came into their lives. I took advantage of the
interval and grew considerably, having proved a most opportune victim
on many an occasion for my disappointed step-mother's ill-humour. This
latter personage had contracted several real or imaginary disorders
and absorbed her own soul, with all its most tender attributes, in her
constant demand and need for a sympathy and solicitude which were
nowhere to be found. Her husband had retired by degrees into the
exclusive refuge of his scientific and literary pursuits, and lived as
effectually apart from the woman he had married, as far as friendly
intercourse and mutual confidence were concerned, as though they were
strangers.

And yet, whenever Mrs. Hampden found herself well enough to go out, my
father accompanied her with the most amiable urbanity; thus, from time
to time, they appeared among the gay coterie to which they always
belonged in name, looking as happy and contented as most husbands and
wives do, who, for half a dozen years or so, have been trying one
another's patience with more or less success.

Thus by a strange unfitness of things, will one unheeded uncared-for
little life drift out by itself into an open sea of dangers and
difficulties, with nothing more wholesome to distract it during the
long lonely hours of many successive days, as they come and go, than
its own morbid tendencies.

Necessarily, this abnormal growth of an impressionable young soul,
began to speak for itself, in accents which would have caught the
ready, willing ear of an attentive parent, had mine been such. In my
twelfth year I was as much a woman as I am to-day, matured and
hardened by an experience that would have blighted a more yielding and
less obdurate spirit.

Convinced, that in point of fact, I was alone in the world, dependent
upon my own resources for whatever little truant ray of sunshine I
might get from the golden flood that illuminated the world outside me,
and forced by rigid, arbitrary circumstances to train my growing
convictions into many a hazardous channel, left to myself to grope
among the dawning mysteries of life, that are a burden to age and
experience even when lightened by the helping hand of a common
sympathy, I ceased before long to struggle against these abstract foes
that made a mockery of my childish strength and resistance.

For the first few years of my life, therefore, I had been my own care,
my own and only friend, and oftentimes my own--but not only--enemy.
Occasionally my father chatted with me, but that was mostly when I was
in good humour, and would not let him get an insight into the secret
workings of my busy little heart. But, even supposing I had, with a
child's instinctive confidence in its parent, gone to him in my lonely
hours, and thrown my hands convulsively about his neck, to tell my
tale of trifling woes, what difference would it have made? Very
little. He would have given me a silver coin or two, and told me to
run away and amuse myself, that he was busy and could not spare his
time for idle amusement. No one knew this better than I did; the
memory of one such experiment tried in my very early youth will never
leave my mind: it seemed to me that no future, however laden with
compensating joys, could efface the dreary outlines which this
childish experience had stamped upon my heart.

That day, when full of a pent-up sorrow I had boldly decided to seek
comfort on my father's knee, is, and ever will be, a living, breathing
present to me. In stifled sobs, I tried to tell my little tale of
grief, and was about to bury my tear-stained face upon his shoulder,
when he raised his eyes impatiently, and brushed away, with a peevish
gesture, one of my salt tears that lay appealingly upon the smooth
broadcloth covering of his arm: he chided me for crying so very
immoderately, saying, he hated "little girls that cried," and drawing
a silver piece from his pocket, he slipped it into my little trembling
hand, and banished me from the room.

I never forgot this, from my dignified, gentlemanly father, although
in my outward conduct there was nothing which insinuated the slightest
reproach for the pain he had given me on that occasion.

When I left his cheerless presence, I remember going back to my
play-room and throwing myself wearily into my little rocking-chair,
where, with my face turned to the wall, I cried as if my baby-heart
would break.

Here I rehearsed each feature of my bitter disappointment, and as my
young spirit rose in proud and angry revolt against a fate that could
wound me so undeservedly, I flung the wretched coin, with which my
thoughtless parent sought to buy his ease and comfort from me,
violently upon the floor.

Through my blinding tears I watched it roll quietly over the carpet
and stop suddenly against the prostrate figure of a doll that lay at a
little distance from where I sat. This incident changed the whole
tenor of my rebellious thought; in the earlier part of the day I had
dressed this doll in very fine clothes, intending to carry it to the
house of a poor neighbor, who lived in the rear of my father's
premises, and whose baby-girl was confined, through some hopeless
deformity, to the narrow limits of an invalid chair.

Something prevented me from carrying out this generous design at the
time, but the discarded coin unexpectedly revived my abandoned
project, and turned my thoughts into a pleasant channel. I rose up and
dried my eyes, and putting on my little sun-bonnet, gathered up the
fashionable wax lady and the piece of despised money, and stealing
down a quiet back-stairway, I went out on my mission of charity.

When I reached the home of my little invalid friend, I peered
noiselessly in at the window, as was my custom, lest, perhaps, I
should awaken her from one of her quiet slumbers, but this time she
was not sleeping; she sat upright in her chair with pillows at her
back, and her thin hair fell from her bowed head over the worn and
dog-eared pages of her mother's prayer-book. It was her only other
companion, besides her mother and me, and through many long, lonely
hours she was wont to turn the leaves backward and forward, dwelling
with the instinctive reverence of unsullied childhood, upon the homely
and inartistic representations it contained of the beautiful Drama of
the Redemption.

Such things, though seemingly trifling to relate, at this remote
period, when the sinful and foolish vanities of the world have crowded
themselves in between me and my cherished memories of that holy epoch,
I now regard as the true and unmistakeable key-note of my after life.

For, was it not to little Ella Wray I first assumed the attitude of
the worldling: subscribing to the laws and exigencies of
conventionality before I had suspected the existence of such an
influence? When she praised me, and thanked me, and urged me to be
grateful to the kind Father who had willed my surroundings to be those
of comfort and prosperity, what did I do? Good reader! I smiled half
consciously, and thus sanctioned her belief in my domestic happiness.
I veiled the sorrow that dwelt in my young heart with the shadows of a
borrowed playfulness, and I sullied the baby innocence of my
unsuspecting soul with a smiling lie.

But even in its infancy, human nature is prone to every passing
weakness that assails it. To know that other eyes looked out from a
narrower sphere upon my individual portion, and found it rich in
advantages over many others: to feel that in spite of all my harassing
little cares, my life could assume an exterior aspect of smoothness
and happiness, was a short-lived, though powerful stimulant, even to
my childish heart; and I could not forfeit the small pleasure I took
in the consciousness, that at least my sufferings were hidden, though
my pleasures were widely known, by laying bare the actual condition of
my affairs.

Naturally enough, this feeling has but strengthened and matured with
time and experience, and to-day, scattered broadcast over the world,
are friends of my childhood, my girlhood, and my womanhood, who look
upon my life as a tolerably beautiful thing, set apart by a lenient
destiny for a perpetual sunshine to brighten.

Ah well! Who knows, in this strange world whether there are many
happier than I? May it not be that other faces wear the mask of smiles
with which I myself have played a double part? I think I know enough
of human nature now, to suspect with Reason, that this livery of
contentment and joy which dazzles our eyes at intervals, as we review
the multitudes of the laughing and the gay, is a thing to be put on
and off at will, like any other garment; and hence is it that the
earthly happiness of men and women is susceptible of a relative
definition only. I do not wish to argue that such a thing as happiness
itself has become as obsolete in our day as hoop-skirts and
side-combs, for, from the earliest reflections I have ever indulged
in, I have concluded that it is quite easy to attain to a tolerable
degree of happiness, if external influences be not too desperately at
variance with our efforts to arrive at its tempting goal: and even
now, when I have made my way through some of the densest and darkest
fogs of experience, I know I should be happy yet, if, some day, I may
see the masses in revolt against the unjust tenets of nineteenth
century _convenances_, and advocating in its stead the beautiful
doctrine of "soul to soul as hand to hand."

Possibly, all these regretful conclusions are a sequel to the early
disappointments and sorrows of my younger days, for, I admit, that
though I thrived after a fashion under their depressing influence,
they had, most necessarily, a peculiar effect upon my temperament.

The one thing that wearied me above and more than all others, was the
changeless monotony of my existence; every day a tiresome repetition
of another, which forced me to attribute little or no value to time.

I was not old enough to be sent to school, although I had entered upon
what is called the years of discretion, but my father's wife had a
high-bred fear, lest in sending me to an educational establishment I
should indulge my uncouth tendencies by cultivating unfashionable
acquaintances, that in after years, might possibly, in some remote,
indefinite way, reflect upon her own unimpeachable dignity.

There came a day, however, when exacting circumstances obliged her to
look upon the prospect of placing me at school with a more impartial
eye. A change was creeping, slowly, but surely, into our lives: hardly
for the better in one way, and yet, in the end, I must acknowledge,
that to it I owe much of the happiness I have ever known.

Whether or not my obdurate step-mother was in reality as susceptible
as a woman should be, I am not free to say; but when, after a few
years of wedded life, the prospect of maternity began to grow less
shadowy and more reliable, her heart did seem to swell at rare
intervals with a real, or assumed pity for the little woman who had
been left to wander about motherless and friendless, spending her
young life, unheeded, among the cheerless apartments of her own
father's house.

While this new phase of existence was unfolding itself before her
eyes, like the lava from a long-slumbering volcano, a kind word or
deed was born now and then of the momentary influence. She would
stroke my head with a gesture of repenting, amending tenderness, give
me a bunch of gay ribbons for my last new doll, or even read me a
thrilling tale from my Christmas book of nursery fictions; but that
impulse was necessarily short-lived, and once it became spent, the
crater of her heart closed up again, and all was as cold and quiet as
before.

To my untutored mind, this relaxation, limited though it was, became a
perplexing mystery. I was conscious of no improvement in my attitude
towards my step-mother, I had not even wished, or determined to show
her any more marked affection or respect than I had ever done, and
this, to tell the truth, was precious little.

I did not know then, that this generous impulse of hers was
independent of her own desire or will, that it filled her heart
without her sanction or command, just as her life-blood did; that it
permeated her very being, when she neither sought nor expected it, and
that as it was self-creative, so would it of itself find a
satisfactory outlet in expressions and actions of tender womanly
solicitude.

As soon as my half-brother made his entrance into the world, however,
things took another turn. I was no longer the free, unfettered
creature I had been for the first part of my life. I could no longer
dispose of my days and hours as I liked best, but was on the contrary
forced to devote many of them to occupations of a most distasteful
nature.

The coming of this insignificant stranger into our home seemed a
disturbing and restless evil in my eyes. Naturally my stepmother was
beside herself with ecstacy, but why should she have expected the rest
of the household to be as absurdly enthusiastic?

When baby slept, the silence and stillness of death were sacredly and
solemnly imposed upon all. When baby was awake, the clatter provoked
for its infantship's pleasure was noisome and deafening to all.

With the advent of this undesirable relative into our home is
associated, for me, the remembrance of all such impatient entreaties
as, "Amey, bring your toys here to baby--Amey, come and sing to
baby--Amey, come and rock baby to sleep"--and I, though striving to
encourage a good intention and a hopeful outlook, finally succumbed to
the very human perversity of my soul, and when every atom of ordinary
endurance had given out, I realized that I had ended by loathing the
very name, or sight, or idea of the unwelcome baby.

Then, came a fresh burden of domestic worries to my unfortunate
step-mother. She could not trust her darling to the care of servants;
each one that she tried seemed determined to kill the little idol;
they handled it as roughly and carelessly as if it were an ordinary
baby; shook it when it screamed and refused to rock it while it slept.
In the end, with the undaunted heroism of unselfish maternity, she
resigned herself wholly and entirely to the exclusive care of her
beloved offspring, ministering to its ever increasing and multiplying
wants, with an admirable forebearance and kindness. Poor woman! she
found more than ample field for her patience and perseverance.

Blest with the healthiest of lungs, my new step-brother had no
scruples about asserting himself loudly and peevishly at all hours of
the day and night; rending the air with prolonged and impatient
screams that wounded the sensitive mother's heart deeply, and
irritated the rest of the household beyond endurance.

By degrees its much tried parent was made to realize that this noisy
acquisition to her home was considered unquestionably and
irreclaimably, her own. No one envied it to her, and as no one sought
to share any of the possible benefits that might follow in its wake,
neither did they seek to bear any of the burden of its existence in
the smallest detail.

The overjoyed, yet afflicted mother, was welcome to whatever comfort
or happiness her prophetic soul foresaw as a recompense to all this
endless worry and trouble. Even my father grew unsympathetic, and
actually arose one night when baby's plaintive minor key was
resounding through the house, and closed his bed-room door most
emphatically, to keep out the disturbing echoes that had broken in
upon his comfortable repose.

None of this passed unnoticed by my fretted stepmother, whose open
soul absorbed every passing instance of this nature, and stowed away
its keen impressions to be acted upon later, when time had modified
her responsibilities, and granted her a little respite from the
troubles of to-day.

In the agitated meanwhile I had begun to try my young wings. I felt
myself growing inwardly and outwardly; something was stirring my heart
with unusual palpitations. I was beginning to realize that life after
all did not mean what daily passed within the narrow arena of my home;
something whispered to me that outside those paltry limits, far away
over all the spires and chimney-tops, where the sky was so bright and
blue, life, real life, unfolded itself under many a varied aspect, and
with this suspicion, sprung up a lingering dissatisfaction, a longing
for something which no words of mine could define.

How clearly does this epoch of my life stand forth from the dreary
background of experience as I look at it from the watch-tower of
to-day? How I know now that this was the farewell passage of my
childhood, which was winging its flight, and leaving me to struggle
with the naked realities of life, which had hitherto been hidden and
undreamt of mysteries to me.

Ah! that passage of childhood, what a void it makes in the growing
heart; and how quietly its place is filled by unworthier influences.
Does all the abstract wealth, which there might be in the growth and
development of those who learn the alphabet of life upon our knee,
take one pang from the natural and pardonable sorrow with which we
watch the heavy footprint of an inevitable experience, crushing out
the last frail remnant of childhood from the hearts of those who such
a little while before were our "little ones?"

There is something far more appealing to the parent's heart in the
half worn stocking of the child who toddled from its cradle to its
grave, than in the mighty quill of her grey-haired poet son, rusted
though it be in the service of his art. In the broken stem of an
unfinished life, a mother mourns a host of possibilities that can
never now be realized; if we may credit the prophecies of such
sorrowing mothers who, bending over the cradle from which some
baby-spirit has just passed into the kingdom of the little ones, tell
in broken accents of sorrow and regret of all the promises of goodness
and greatness which have been sacrificed with that life, we must truly
admit that the world in all its wealth of heroes, bold and brave, its
bards, its poets, its grand masters of the quill, the chisel and the
brush, has not on record such another career as has been blighted in
its bloom each time the stern death-angel stood beside an infant's
cot.

And, if there are evils in our day which no human power can baffle or
subdue, with which reason and morals are struggling in vain, we must
not forget, as we dwell upon them, what the possible, nay even
probable mission was, of each little pair of dimpled hands that he
crossed on each still unheaving bosom, wherein might have been buried
secrets and mysteries which the world will now never know.

Yet, methinks, this transit from the cradle to the coffin is not so
sad in all its bearings as that other death of childhood, which
introduces us, not into a safe and definite eternity, but only into
another phase of temporal life; when the toys and the picture books
are stowed away, when the mind and heart are awakening in their
beautiful, untarnished susceptibility to the impressions of a world of
perils and of sorrows.

Not unlike our final passage is it either, for we go through it once,
and once only, and from its threshold our footsteps are directed
towards good or evil, for after-life. Let us remember this always,
when we are tempted to pass our rigid judgments upon our
fellow-creatures. Let us not lose sight of these occult impediments of
fate, that may have caused our fallen brother to halt and stagger in
the way of righteousness almost in spite of his watchfulness and eager
intentions to do what is good.

Without wearying the reader with a detailed account of that period of
my life immediately associated with the advent of my interesting
half-brother, I can permit myself to mention a few things which were
only a very natural outgrowth of this altered condition of our
domestic affairs.

First and foremost be it understood that I looked upon this new-comer
as a contribution sent by nature to fill up the gap that existed
between my step-mother's affections and mine, and naturally enough,
according as this child grew he drifted our two lives farther and
farther asunder. He absorbed all the latent sympathy and love from the
maternal heart, and as such ardent sentiments had long been aliens
from my breast, he had nothing to draw from the second source but a
placid and harmless indifference.

My father held a reception occasionally in his sanctum, whither baby
was carried with great pomp and ceremony to be smiled upon approvingly
until his good humour gave way, as soon as the little features
wrinkled ominously my father waved his hand towards the door,
escorting mother, and child, and nurse with the most eager courtesy
out of the room.

I need not tell my readers that the machinery of our domestic life was
sadly awry; neither in separate parts, nor as a whole, did it work
properly or satisfactorily, the metal was harsh and the little wheels
could never be got to run briskly or smoothly. How could they? I think
of all the hopeless conditions on earth, that which aspires to be able
to blend human lives together, which have no more leaning towards one
another than virtue to vice, is the maddest and vainest of all.

An absence of common sympathies between two human hearts, will drift
them apart in spite of the hugest efforts that can be made to attract
them to a point of mutual interest; they who hope either by subterfuge
or unselfish zeal, to reconcile phases of human character that have
not originally sprung from a common root of harmonious unison or
contrast, are as sure to see their ambition as ingloriously defeated
as if they had revived the search for the philosopher's stone.

And yet how much estrangement there is among men and women who, if
they had never been bound together by the sacred and solemn pledges of
wedded love, are supposed still to live according to a precept of
universal charity? How indifferent they become to one another's
fortune or fate? How repulsive to them the very suggestion of entering
generously into one another's lives to share each other's pleasures
and pains?

The world is full of this occult antagonism; every day Christians, as
I have known them, look upon the happiness or sorrow of their brother
toilers as so much subtracted from their own glad or miserable
experience. Hence do they begrudge the smiles of fortune that cheer
another life outside their own, and are so easily satisfied to see
furrows on other brows than their own. I know that the human heart is
instinctively covetous of earthly happiness, and, in nine cases out of
ten argues that its end justifies the means, whatever they may be, of
insuring it. But I also know, that those fitful flashes of sunlight
that cross the path of struggling mortals in the course of an ordinary
human life, are too visionary and short-lived to begin to repay us for
the unworthy barter of our better selves, which is the price of such
transient joys.

What is real happiness but a memory or an anticipation? Do we realize
that it presides over our daily lives? Not until it has become a thing
of the past; and as for the happiness of anticipation, it is not worth
much when we take into account the vague uncertainty of the issues of
time, and the instability of unborn to-morrows.

In a word then, our pleasure is nothing but a negative sensation while
it lasts; we are conscious that, for the time being, the burdensome
fetters of sorrow are loosened, and our souls expand in a glorious
freedom, the power of fate is temporarily suspended, the pressure is
removed from our spirit which soars about in its native element, like
a captive bird set free, flapping its poor paralysed wings that from
long imprisonment have almost forgotten their use--but pain!

Ah! surely no one questions whether pain is a positive sensation or
not; no one at least whose head has been bowed by adversity until his
lips have touched the bitter waters, and tasted perhaps largely of
their unpleasantness! Pain is vastly more to the human heart than the
absence of pleasure; pain is not merely an emptiness, or void, created
by the flight of more cheerful influences; it has a more definite and
distinct acceptation than this would allow; it has as many dark and
melancholy meanings as there are suffering souls in existence; it has
its phases of youth and maturity, now hopeful, now despairing, either
our enemy or our friend.

It professes to dwell among the children of men with the very
strictest impartiality, for pain is an aristocrat and a pauper; pain
rides in fine carriages, and clothes itself in fine linen; it smiles
and sings as often as it mourns and weeps; pain is learned, and it is
ignorant; it underlies the deepest, tenderest love, and it instigates
the darkest, bitterest hatred; in a word it is a weed which infests
the very choicest parterres of our minds and hearts, it thrives among
the buds and blossoms of men's intellects, and abounds above all among
the flowers and fruits of his affections; it is indigenous to both
soils, and no toiler, however industrious or persevering, has ever yet
succeeded in subduing its ravages.

It is no wonder then that we sometimes go on a wild-goose chase after
pleasure; it is not surprising that the wisest of us make foolish
attempts to grasp the will-o'-the-wisp that has been coaxing and
deceiving men for centuries. It is surprising that our persistent
self-confidence persuades our better sense that where countless
generations of pleasure-seekers have failed we can hope to succeed.

This parenthetical deviation is the fruit of my deep reflections
concerning this early period of my development; it is the web which
the deft fingers of my memory have woven around many a quiet reverie;
the substance of many a fire side cogitation, the phantoms of many a
twilight's dreaming.

I doubt not, that in that world of speculative opinions and
questionings, I have met the kindred spirits of many of my fellow
beings, clad in the ideal personality with which my thought invests
people, at the cross of those four great roads towards which, from all
corners of the earth, the spirits of mankind come trooping. We have
only to close our lids upon our external surroundings and swift as
thought itself is our passage into that fairy land of our reverie.

As early as my tenth year I had begun to build castles in the open
fire and to people the gloaming with whispering shadows; somehow the
habit has grown with me through all these years, with this difference,
however: in the reveries of my womanhood the heroes and heroines come
to me, from a long vanished past, clothed in a misty reality, and
associated with every joy and sorrow of my life.

In my childhood these were typical visions, the anticipation of a
restless impatience which yearned for the touchstone of sober
experience, to-day they are the re-creation of memory, and a rehearsal
of all those circumstances that have made sober experience a
comprehensive word for me.

Not that my life has made a heroine of me either in the world's eyes
or my own. I dare say, to the passive observer, it is plain and
ordinary enough. It is when we take away the flesh and blood reality,
which is the temple of the moral man, that the common-place aspects of
life become strange and attractive.

Subtract one of those every-day lives from the busy, moving mass of
humankind and place it under the microscope; bring up to the visible
surface all that has lain hidden for years from the casual glance of
the general observer; lay bare the secret tenor of its every thought
and motive and impulse. Is it any longer the thing it seemed to be
when jostled about in the busy throng?

Pluck one of the dusty blades of grass that grow unheeded by the
roadside; there are hundreds of them at your feet so much alike that
the one you chose had no identity, whatever, until you had, by chance
or design, separated it from the rest. Bear it away to your home and
place it under a powerful lens; is it still the same uninteresting
blade it was a moment ago out in the noisy and crowded thoroughfare?
Why does your gaze become riveted upon what is revealed? Ah! you
discern that such homely things are not at all what you have been wont
to think them. You are astonished to find how each individual trifle
is in itself a wonderful creation, swarming with a hidden and undreamt
of life, feeding a multitude of appetites, satisfying countless
cravings, struggling with a most powerful vitality, and challenging
powers, whose unseen tyranny is unsuspected by more than half the
world.

No wonder, then, that a singled-out human life excites our
astonishment; no wonder that we look upon an isolated fellow-creature
as if he were not one of us, but removed by adventitious circumstances
far above or below the common level of men and women.

It is not always the exaggerating pen of the author that creates
heroes and heroines out of our prosy humanity, and it is an undeniable
and stable fact that truth is far stranger than fiction. It is because
we men and women will conceal the realities of our lives from one
another, and under the banner of an all-enduring pride, struggle for
the privilege of living under a surface of smooth, unruffled evenness,
that humanity has become susceptible of so many false and misleading
interpretations.




CHAPTER II.


As every human life has its crises and turning-points for better or
worse, it will not surprise the reader to learn that there came a day
when Destiny, having nothing else to do, probably, turned her
good-humoured attention towards mine.

The commemoration of the coming into the world of my step-mother's
illustrious darling had been celebrated with due and undue festivities
and enthusiasm from the rising to the setting of a golden June sun.
Whether from an excess of spasmodic affectionate hugging, which, by
the way, was the chief feature of these joyful monthly, and quarterly,
and half-yearly solemnities, or not, the little being in question was
most unmanageably peevish and ill-humoured for three or four days
following these occasions of ecstatic thanksgiving.

One would imagine that by this time I had had sense enough to train
myself into a placid resignation over such circumstances of my life,
as seemed to me to be presided over by some inevitable ill-luck, but,
on the contrary, a growing perversity began to stimulate me at this
epoch more eagerly than ever to rebel against decrees so openly unfair
to me, and unable or unwilling, to cope with this moral enemy that had
taken so firm a hold of me, I yielded myself up, a sort of helpless
and reckless victim to its wiles, at the sacrifice, I must admit, of
my personal peace and comfort.

Usually, at this period I surprised and annoyed myself, when, in
passing accidentally before some tell-tale mirror, I saw the
reflection of a distressed and impatient scowl: usually, too, I was
conscious of my step being quick and angry, I was not aware, however,
that it was a growing deformity of my moral nature, oozing out thus in
every look and tone and gesture.

I had no apprehension of a dawning crisis that would call upon me to
declare war against my worse or better self, for, of course, they
could not both be mistress of the field. How could I, all untaught,
suspect that upon the issue of such a victory would depend the
happiness or misery of my after life?

Fortunately for me, some kind unseen hand was stretching forth in the
hour of my need, somebody's deft fingers snatched the tangled web that
had gone so far astray in the weaving, and in the nick of time made a
hazardous effort to smoothen the silken threads for the busy loom that
waits not for the slow or the erring.

I was standing on the gravel path beside a bed of flowers that was the
object of my fondest care, one fair summer morning, immediately after
a festive celebration in baby's honour. My cherished, but homely, wall
flowers were dripping in the morning sunlight, and every leaf on my
blossomless geraniums was carefully saturated.

I stood, with my faded water-pot carelessly dangling from three
fingers of one hand, looking so absorbedly down the avenue after the
vanishing outlines of a glittering carriage that had just rolled
splendidly by, that the dregs of my water-can trickled all unheeded by
me, down the side of my new sateen frock, accomplishing what, in the
eyes of my step-mother, would seem nothing less than an absolute ruin
and wreck.

My attention was riveted upon the liveried driver and shining gilded
trimmings of this handsome conveyance, and a flood of serious
reflections suddenly burst upon me. I had begun to imagine myself the
lucky centre of a thousand and one happy possibilities. I was grown
up, and out in the world, the wife of a very rich man, with costly
plumes in my bonnet, and rich lace on my showy parasol, like the lady
who had just driven by: I was quite my own mistress, with servants and
other people to obey me. I had a dashing barouche of my own, and was
rolling in conscious grandeur past my step-mother's window, with the
back of my expensive bonnet turned towards the half-closed shutter,
through which she was sure to be peering enviously--when the laths of
the very shutter in question were shaken impatiently, and a hasty,
authoritative voice cried out, "If you've nothing else to do but spoil
your new pink frock out there, Amelia Hampden, I wish you would come
in and play with your baby-brother for awhile;" and then, as the blind
and voice were lowered, I heard the usual "enough to provoke a saint,"
which was the finishing touch to every reprimand I either did, or did
not, deserve.

History repeats itself; nothing is surer. Here was I hand in hand with
a well-known hero of the Arabian Nights, weeping in open-mouthed
sorrow and astonishment over my basket of shattered glassware. I had
broken the salutary precept which exhorts us sanguine mortals not to
count our chickens before they are hatched, and now mourned the
prescribed result, an ice-cold shower bath in a Canadian December
could hardly be a more undesirable and unlooked for intrusion than was
this unappreciated and pressing invitation of Mrs. Hampden's in my
ears at this particular moment.

The rude awakening which her words caused me made me look quite absurd
in my own eyes, and with the sudden consciousness that I had been
making a fool of myself, pondering over such shadowy improbabilities,
as they seemed to me now, I turned sharply and impatiently from the
spot where I had been standing, and passing through a rustic gateway
at the end of the walk, I flung my innocent water-pot, with a gesture
of desperate anger, in among the cedar-bushes that skirted the
causeway leading into the lawn, and passed into the house.

It has been written, that "nothing like the heavy step betrays the
heavy heart," and if this be true, the matter of weight regarding the
seat of my affections, on this particular morning, was not a trivial
one. With an inflamed and spiteful wilfulness, I stamped my feet with
a louder and heavier tread on each step, as I ascended to answer my
unwelcome summons.

When I reached my step-mother's bed-chamber, the heavy curtain of
padded repp, which was suspended for the prevention of such draughts
as might be smuggled in through key-holes, or other minute openings
caused by an ill-fitting door, was drawn quite across the entrance,
and in my hasty and unforeseeing impatience I pushed it rudely aside
with rough hands and admitted myself within the sacred precincts, just
in time to see myself branded by my own actions, an intolerable little
imp, who, on this occasion, if never before, _was_ "enough to provoke
a saint."

In drawing the curtain so hastily from the entrance, I had pushed the
panels of the door rudely in, which unexpected treatment caused that
oft-abused fixture to swing unusually far back on its hinges, and
knock with a heart-rending violence against the edge of baby's frail
little cot, over which the fretted mother was now bending
breathlessly.

In a moment the terrible nature of my misdeed burst upon me; my
step-mother's horrified countenance and the baby's frightened screams
were a simultaneous and forcible indication of what awful results may
spring from a trifling source. I became angry with myself, for once,
and with a very contrite countenance, I went towards my step-mother
and held my arms out repentantly, offering to soothe the refractory
darling, all by myself.

But, by this time her indignation had found a voice, and interrupted
my eager solicitude for reparation with a volley of well-merited
reproaches. Stamping her slipper emphatically upon the ground, and
declaring that "I would pay for this," she turned to the screaming
little mortal who was struggling nervously among lace and finery, with
no small show of an ill-temper of its own, and resumed the patient and
would be soothing lullaby, whose efficacy in the first instance had
been so ruthlessly spoiled by my impetuous conduct.

Not daring to leave the room again until summarily dismissed by the
ruling power, I stood guiltily by the doorway with a look of sullen
helplessness on my face, toying half indifferently with the ends of a
pink ribbon that was fastened artistically to my frock. Suddenly, the
unforgiving baby sent forth a fresh volley of screams, and the irate
mother turned towards me with a new and awful scowl and bade
me--"Begone" that "my very presence terrified the child."

Nothing loth to leave this scene of confusion of which I myself was
the direct cause, I turned abruptly and quitted the apartment in an
impertinent silence. My step, so long as I thought my step-mother
could hear it, was quick and haughty.

I passed along the corridor above, and down the broad front stairway,
rattling the heels of my garden shoes on the tiles of the hall below
with rather unnecessary emphasis. A loud slamming of the library
door--which shook the pendants of the gasaliers and caused a momentary
quaking of the whole house--announced my exit into the side garden,
where I threaded my way among trees and flowerbeds to a vine-covered
summer-house that stood at the end of the lawn. Arrived here, I flung
myself upon one of the rustic benches that lined the walls, and
throwing my arms at full length across the small table that stood
beside me, I laid my face down upon them and burst into tears. After
all, I was only a child, though so obstinate and impulsive: only a
child, and yet I was very miserable. Reader, have you ever been
persuaded to a popular, though strange belief, that our happiest are
our youngest days? Are you able to look regretfully back upon your
long-vanished yesterdays and wish that destiny might, for one short
moment of time, let you hold them in your hands, to live them all over
again? If so, indeed your youth must have been an exceptionally happy
one: for whether I speak from a personal experience or from
observation, I cannot agree that the paths of childhood are flooded
with Life's sunshine, or overgrown with Fortune's flowers. If we look
back upon our earliest sorrows (and who are they that have none to
look upon?), and take into consideration the narrow limits of our
capacity for either pleasure or pain when we are young, we must admit
that a broken doll or a lost penny are, after all, as fruitful of
genuine and hopeless misery in their way, as are, in after-life, a
broken heart or a lost friend.

I do believe that on that June morning, when full of an untold sorrow,
I stole away to the most secret and secluded spot I could find, I was
not less miserable than I have been many a June morning since, though
the best of life's hard lessons have been learned in the meantime. It
seemed to me that all my hopes, and wishes, and endeavors would always
be vain and fruitless; I could not see a bright side anywhere I
looked. I was always doing and saying the wrong things; I was in
everybody's way: no one wanted me, no one cared for me--why was I ever
born? I had no companions. My stepmother looked down upon the
dangerous habit of allowing children to cultivate juvenile friendships
indiscriminately, and I was not sufficient unto myself for
distractions that would keep me quietly out of the way. What good was
I? I was always ill-humored, vexing my step-mother and making baby
cry. It was plain to see that I was one too many in the world, and
whatever I did with myself I would be surely trespassing upon
somebody's privilege, outraging somebody's patience, and making myself
a nuisance generally. If there was a better place, thought I, I wonder
would I go there when all this discord of my present life had killed
me? Besides, old Hannah had told me that I had another mother in that
vague "better place." Every night at Hannah's knee I recited a little
prayer for her, and asked her to watch over me, to guard me from evil
and make me worthy of joining her some day in her happy home. If my
"other mother" was so sweet and kind and good, as Hannah told me in
confiding whispers she was, why did she not come to me when I was in
tears and tell me how to be good like her? She was too far away, I
supposed, up among the blue sunlit clouds, where all was bright and
cheerful: an angel-mother with beautiful white wings like the picture
in Hannah's prayer-book, and a sweet smiling face that always looked
down on me, watching my words and actions. And while I thought thus, I
saw many such white-winged angels floating noiselessly about in an
exquisite confusion, and distant strains of music, as Hannah said they
sang, filled my listening ears. I felt myself being lifted gently by
tender, unseen hands, and I wondered whether they would bear me far up
above spire and tower, away from all the worries of this desolate
world, into that happy sphere beyond where all is peace, and joy, and
contentment.

On a sudden, I opened my eyelids and looked up. A cry of "Mr. Dalton!"
escaped my lips before I had met his answering glance. I had
understood the situation and buried my face upon his shoulder, to hide
the fast gathering tears that swelled into an after-flood and
threatened to deluge my already tell-tale cheeks. I was no longer
thrown recklessly upon the wooden summer-house bench. The gentle hands
that raised me in my dream and bore me heavenward, were not those of a
far-off angel, as I understood the term, they were the strong brawny
palms of a man of four-and-thirty years, not so strong that their
touch could not be as gentle as a mother's own, not so brawny that
they could not dry the tearful lids of a sleeping child without
disturbing its repose.

He had taken me in his arms and pillowed my drooping head upon his
manly breast. When I opened my eyes he was looking dreamily, half
sadly, half smilingly, into my face. He was not what you, reader,
would call a handsome man, for you never knew him. To you, and to all
the world perhaps but me, he would be no more than a man in a crowd.
But I need not here bring forward the wonderful power of association
which is the underlying beauty reflected from many a homely surface to
eyes that prize and cherish them. What though a thing possess not in
reality those charms with which it is identical in our minds and
hearts? That which we believe to be, is, as effectually for us as if
its existence were sanctioned and sustained by all mankind, and so far
as personal conviction goes there is no standard outside the
individual one. My idea of the beautiful is the only beautiful I can
ever really acknowledge or enjoy, and yet how far astray may it not be
from the concurrent idea of the majority, which is supposed to be the
only true standard.

With a quick though earnest purpose, Mr. Dalton laid his strong warm
hand upon my head and turned my tearful face towards him. There was a
hovering smile around the pale, calm countenance that met my shy and
half averted look.

"Who is this?" he asked, peering into my misty eyes. "Is this Amey
Hampden, I wonder, or have I made some dreadful mistake?"

I saw immediately that he suspected me of having been a naughty girl,
and my sensitive pride was breaking into revolt. I tried to force
myself from his steady hold, but his knitted fingers were as iron
fetters about me. I had nothing left to do but give way to an outburst
of rising ill-humor, or through my gathering tears, to make an humble
confession of all that had passed that morning. While I debated with
myself I was conscious of his steady gaze being fixed upon me. I saw
the half-mischievous smile vanish from the corners of his eyes and
mouth; my lips were trembling with a suppressed sorrow. He saw it, and
bending over me asked in a tender, solicitous voice:

"What is the matter, little Amey? Are you ill? Come, tell me" he
urged, with a gentle firmness turning me around and taking both my
hands in his own large ones.

"No, no, Mr. Dalton, Amey is not ill" I answered, sighing and looking
away. "I wish she was though" I continued after a pause, "ill enough
to die."

And this was all I could say, for my lips trembled ominously, though
there were now no unshed tears in my eyes.

The expression on my companion's face changed suddenly. He had worn a
half amused, half sympathetic look all along, as if my little troubles
were something he could afford to smile upon, and persuade even myself
to laugh at, but I fancy my voice must have been unusually sorrowful,
as I am sure my face was unusually tear-stained and disfigured, for he
drew me to him a little closer and toying ever so affectionately and
kindly with my flowing hair, his tone was gently remonstrative as he
said:

"Amey, do you know that you use very wicked words when you talk like
this? You are a very comfortable and fortunate little girl in many
ways, and because something disagreeable happens now and then you must
not be so impatient and want to die. If you did die now" he continued
slowly and emphatically--then paused and added, "maybe you would be
sorry."

"I don't care" came from me in a half defiant retort, "I couldn't be
sorrier than I am now. I am not comfortable and I am not fortunate,
and disagreeable things are always happening, and if I can't die
soon," I went on waxing quite tragic, "I'll run away."

I stopped short after this, thinking I had put a splendid
finishing-touch to my out-spoken determination. I do not know whether
I expected Mr. Dalton to faint with fright and surprise on hearing
such a daring declaration from me. If I did, I must have been sadly
disappointed when I detected a shadow of that hovering smile flitting
back across his features, and heard him ask in a provoking tone.

"Away! Where, Amey?"

The incisive ridicule implied in these words urged me to a still more
reckless defiance, and affecting a very cutting sneer I answered--

"Perhaps you think I am not in earnest, Mr. Dalton, but _you'll see!_
Remember I have told you that I am wretched, and it's all _her_ fault
When I am gone you can tell papa that 'twas all her doing, that she
hated me and I hated her, and I thought 'twas better to go away--and I
_will_ go away Mr. Dalton"--I emphasized--"away into the bush, and if
no one comes to take me I'll do like the babes in the woods, and the
little birds will cover me with nice green leaves when I'm dead."

There were no tears now, I had worked myself into a dry rage and could
look my monitor full in the face; my little arms were crossed with a
determination worthy of maturer years, and I was grand with the
conviction of having frightened this big man into a belief of my
rambling threats. I was a little disconcerted, however, when he looked
at me seriously and said in a slow measured tone:

"Then _this_ is not the Amey Hampden that I have known all along. She
would never have said such ugly things as those I have just heard; she
was not a selfish little girl, and would fear to displease her friends
or those who loved her."

He was winning me over, but before I yielded I must aim another arrow.

"I guess you're right after all Mr. Dalton" I answered swinging one
kid shoe in an aimless indifferent manner, and looking purposely away
at the leg of the rustic table, "cause _this_ Amey Hampden hasn't got
any friends, or any one to love her, either."

"Are you telling the truth now, Amey? Look at me and repeat that," he
interrupted quickly.

I wished to be very brave, and turned my eyes full upon him; he took
my chin in his large, warm palm and looked steadily into my face for a
moment. I was conquered, and he saw it; he stooped and kissed me, and
we both laughed as I said

"Well; you never _said_ you were my friend."

He arose, and taking me by the hand, we strolled over the lawn and
passed into the library together.

Ernest Dalton was nearly twenty-five years my senior!




CHAPTER III.


It is now an old and respected adage that "coming events cast their
shadows before," and had I only been at all alive to the growing
changes in the routine of our daily life, I might easily have detected
the outline of some hovering shadow which was heralding the advent of
some strange, and hitherto undreamt of interruption, into the
questionably peaceful monotony of my early career.

One fine August morning, some weeks after my tragic interview with Mr.
Dalton, I sat on the step of the outer kitchen stairway, which led
into an artistically cultivated vegetable patch at the rear of the
house, absorbed in the intensely interesting occupation of cutting
some elegantly-coloured ladies out of a superannuated fashion-plate.

On the step above me was my garden hat, inverted, into which I
deposited my paper "swells" according as I trimmed them: on the step
below me sat old Hannah, scraping some new potatoes, according to her
established principles of economy. We both worked diligently and
silently for awhile, and then old Hannah, pausing with a half cleaned
potatoe in one hand and a knife dripping with water in the other,
looked at me seriously for a moment and said half meditatively:

"Well now; arn't you the baby, Miss Amelia, to spend your time over
that foolish stuff; fitter for you be knitting a little garter, or
hemming a little handkerchief for yourself."

I smiled, and without raising my eyes from the critical curve of my
paper lady's bustle, which I was then rounding most carefully, I
answered:

"I suppose I might do better with my time, Hannah, if I knew how, but
as I don't, I'd rather be doing this than nothing."

"It says a lot for Miss Forty, then," Hannah put in indignantly, "to
think you're goin' into your teens before long and that's all you know
how to do!"

"Miss de Fortier did not come to teach me sewing and knitting, Hannah.
She taught me lessons."

"Lessons how are you! And what's become of them if she did? Oh, its a
fine way children are brought up in this country," the old woman went
on half in soliloquy; "a bit of this and a bit of that and not much of
either. I pity the housekeepers ye'll make yet. God help the poor men
that are waiting for ye. Many's the missing button and broken sock
they'll have to put up with!"

"Well, Hannah," I interrupted, beginning an impromptu justification
and defence--but Hannah was destined never to have her conviction
shaken, for just then I heard a sharp rapping at the library window,
and gathering up the fragments of my fashion-plate in my linen
pinafore, I ran outside and looked towards that end of the house. My
father was standing at the open casement, and beckoned me to go to
him. Whether from the novelty of the occurrence, or the instinctive
awe in which I stood of my father, I immediately let go the margin of
my pinafore, dropping scissors and ladies and all, in a most brusque
and heedless manner, and hastened into the library, while I was
smoothing out the wrinkled folds of my clean, starched apron.

In my excitement I had forgotten to wonder at the strange
circumstance, but when my little hand clutched the great knob of the
library door and turned it, and when the placid countenance of my
step-mother looked up at me from a comfortable easy-chair at the
opposite side of the room, I felt that some awful moment had dawned on
my existence. With as much nerve and self-control as a child usually
displays on such an occasion, I closed the door behind me and walked
towards the window where my father was standing.

He was clad in a gown of ruby cashmere, and wore an expensive cap and
slippers to match; the girdle was untied, leaving the rich chenille
tassels to trail almost upon the ground, and the velvet fronts so
elaborately embroidered were crushed rudely aside by his hands, which
were thrust into his breeches pockets.

When I came up to where he stood, he turned slowly around and viewed
me in my diminutive entirety from head to foot. Unable to restrain her
love of interference any longer, my step-mother here advised me
parenthetically to "stand up straight," sustaining her reasons for
thus counselling me by the cheerful intelligence that "I was disposed
to be round-shouldered any way, and should do my best to check the
deformity." I raised my head and lowered my shoulders in silent
obedience to this meek injunction, preparing myself inwardly for an
attack of a much less generous and still more personal nature than
this. What was my surprise when my father, taking a step towards me,
and placing one hand half affectionately on my head, remarked in a
rather playful and, for him, quite a frivolous tone:

"Oh, we none of us go straight to Heaven, do we, Amey? We must bend
our shoulders and droop our heads a little first."

I was grateful to him for coming thus to my rescue, although I
understood neither the meaning of his ambiguous words, nor the motives
which prompted him to use them. I see more clearly through them now,
however.

"But," he continued, taking me by the hand and leading me towards the
lounge behind him, "this is not exactly what I want to talk to you
about; I admit that you are backward in many respects, but that is not
altogether your fault."

I was looking at him with riveted attention while he spoke, sublimely
innocent of the import of a single word he uttered.

"And," he added, in a slower and more directly communicative tone, as
he disengaged his hand from mine and leaned his arm on the back of the
lounge behind me, "I have decided to send you to a first-rate school,
Amey, where you will have a chance to perfect yourself in every way;
do you think you will like to go away to school?" he asked, so timidly
that one would have thought my opinion on the matter could have some
little value.

Before I had time to master this question with all its ponderous
possibilities, my step-mother observed obligingly,

"Of course she would like it, Alfred, and even if she wouldn't you
know she ought to go; Amelia herself knows," she continued, without
looking at me, "that she is quite a dunce for her age, and will need
to work very hard in order to make up for lost time. So, your father
and I have decided," she added conclusively, "that you shall go to
boarding-school, Amelia, as early next month as you can be got ready."

The word "boarding-school" was to me, perhaps, the vaguest and most
indefinite in the English language. I knew that such places existed,
but it had never entered into my juvenile conception of things to
associate them in any way with my present or future career. In my
dreamings I had often pictured myself as grown up and matured; I had
even pictured my womanhood so far as tying two of Hannah's long aprons
about my waist, one in front and the other behind, and with a shawl
thrown cornerwise over my shoulders, to fancy myself a lady in "long
dresses" like the "Miss Hartmanns" that called upon my step-mother.

I had wished to be the wife of a great, rich man, that I might do as I
pleased with myself, and be "somebody" with my airs and graces, but I
had never met such an obstacle in the long rambles of my reverie as
"going to school." When, therefore, the subject was thrust upon me
without any preparation, I felt as if I had seen a ghost and was told
to go and speak to it, that it wouldn't harm me; and, lest the reader
should attribute my emotion to a more natural, and, I dare say,
becoming sentiment, I will confess that it was owing purely to the
nervous shock which I sustained at the unexpected mention of so
important a change in my life, that my eyes filled up with tears, and
that I gave way to other ambiguous signs of appropriate agitation.

All this, however, was neither here nor there, so far as the fixed
intention of my parents was concerned to dispose of me for an
indefinite period of time, and within three weeks of that day when the
announcement was first made to me, I was crying myself to sleep in a
narrow little bed, hundreds of miles away from my father's house.

Perhaps there was not another girl among the three hundred boarders of
Notre Dame Abbey, that had such little reason to be home-sick as Amey
Hampden; and yet--God help us! into what strange moods we are prone to
fall! When a wide-spreading distance had thrust itself between me and
the home of my early days, I could not help feeling that, after all,
my heart had tendrils like other people's, and that this separation
had torn them rudely away from the objects, few or many, worthy or
unworthy, around which they had twined with a clinging firmness.

The bare, white-washed walls of this strange dormitory brought out in
touching relief the cosy corners of my own little room at home, and
the strict and rigid discipline, to which I felt I never could
conform, made me look back with a hopeless regret upon the wandering,
aimless hours I had spent unfettered, before I became a pupil of this
bleak institution.

I did not know then, as I know now, that it is not the house which
makes the home; that white-washed walls and painted floors may melt
into artistic beauty, where glows the never smouldering fire of
Christian love; and I have searched the world in vain for many a year,
among riches and luxuries and comforts, but I have never had the
smallest glimpse of that same abiding, enduring and self-sacrificing
love which presided over me, waking or sleeping, smiling or weeping,
during my happy, yet transient sojourn, in that distant Abbey of Notre
Dame.

Within its walls my childhood melted into girlhood, and my girlhood
into womanhood, and still, when I look out over the tree-tops, away
beyond the misty mountains in the west, towards the spot where this my
truly happiest home lies nestled, when with one sweeping stroke of my
active pen I cancel twenty years of my life, and am back again a
laughing, careless girl among my school companions, what is time to
me? Only a huge and ugly shadow flitting between me and all that I
have ever loved or cherished! A shadow, however, that flickers and
bounds away, when, with her magic lantern, memory floods the vista of
the past, with the light of "other days."

When I returned to my father's house to spend a short vacation among
my earliest friends, I had entered upon my sixteenth year. I had of
course, in the interval, been visited alternately by my father and
step-mother, who kept me quite _au courant_ of all that transpired in
their fashionable world in my absence.

I had received photographs of my interesting half brother, which made
me familiar with the changes wrought in him physically, by time; but
all this had no satisfaction for me, who would rather one glimpse of
old Hannah's frilled cap, or one peep through the narrow panes of Ella
Wray's humble cottage, than all the spicy intelligences of the doings
and sayings of possibly great people, for whom, however, I cared but
very little.

At the close of our summer session of that year my father brought me
home for a visit of three months. I had grown considerably, and for a
person of tolerably good health, was very slender, which gave me the
appearance of being yet taller than I was, and I felt an instinctively
spiteful satisfaction in the consciousness that I had quite overcome
any tendencies I might ever have had towards being round-shouldered;
the regular calisthenic exercises which we went through at the convent
had made a decided change for the better in my personal appearance.

I was not long at home before I detected a resolution on the part of
my step-mother to adopt a new, and altogether plausible, attitude
towards me. I was no longer a child; that was a self-evident fact:
neither was I yet what society calls a "young lady," but now-a-days an
interesting medium has been established and acknowledged; it is the
first grade wherein the embryo society belles are initiated into all
the intricacies of high life. It has its own peculiarities, its
flutters of excitement, its rounds of pleasures, and distractions of
every kind, aye--it has even its gossip, although the whisperers are
but budding misses with golden or raven locks floating down their
backs.

It is the adolescent stage: where the lisp or drawl, most popular in
the advanced circles, is affected with unquestionable propriety: when
growing girls of susceptible sixteen, or thereabout, are meekly
subjected to a rigid training and instruction by their older and more
sophisticated sisters, when they learn "dauncing" and "tennis" and
"riding," and go to small-and-earlies where a few grown couples are
also invited to amuse them, or rather I should say instruct them.

Quite unconscious of any such prescribed routine being the "thing"
among my family circle, I was almost stupefied by the look of
distracted horror which flashed over my step-mother's face, when, the
week after my arrival, I shocked her sensitive good breeding by a
coarse betrayal of my unpardonable ignorance.

It was a perfect June day, flooded with a bright but not overwarm
sunshine; the young leaves on the maple boughs outside my bed-room
window were swaying gently against the lattice, and below in the
freshly trimmed garden the flowers were unfolding their early beauty
to the summer warmth.

I had sought the safe retreat of my room, that I might, as I had
promised, write long and loving letters to some of my much-regretted
school-friends. When all my preparations were ready, and I had dated
the first of these effusions, I was disturbed by a timid knock at the
door. I laid down my pen resignedly and went to open: it was the pert
housemaid, who delivered "Mrs. Hampden's request that Miss Amelia
would kindly begin to dress."

"Dress for what?" said I, in impatient surprise. "This is Tuesday,
Miss," the pampered maid answered insinuatingly, "Mrs. Hampden will be
at home."

"So will I, Janet," I interrupted hastily, "and my present toilet is
quite good enough for the house."

With this rejoinder I closed the door a little forcibly, and went back
to my writing. I had only time to trace--"My darling Ruby,"--when,
without intimation or announcement of any kind, my step-mother burst
into my room, with her hair half dressed, and her toilet jacket flying
loosely about her,--

"Do you want to disgrace us in the eyes of these prattling servants,
Amelia Hampden?" she began in a hoarse undertone, beckoning towards
the hall outside: "the idea of not understanding my message any better
than that," she went on in a whisper of reproachful despair. "Anyone
would know, that when you've been away so long, you will be sure to
have people calling on you, so put away that"--she added imperatively,
pointing disdainfully to my treasured writing materials--"and dress
yourself. The Merivale girls, and the Hunters, and all those others
will be here before you are half ready."

I obeyed in placid silence; this was not the first hint which
circumstances had thrown out of what was before me, while I remained
at home. We were very stylish, very fashionable people, it seemed,
although I was so unworthy of sustaining my part of the reputation, in
my insignificant opinion we were very silly and very empty-minded
creatures, and it was with this very encouraging conviction that I
proceeded to stow away my pen and paper, to renounce the rare pleasure
I had counted upon for two days before that, and to prepare myself for
the possible intrusion of some juvenile Merivales and Hunters.

Janet came in to dress my hair and fasten my new kid boots, and
otherwise bore me with endeavors to beautify me for my reception. It
was a task, however, that was soon ended, and half an hour later I was
seated in the drawing room below listening passively to the small talk
of some very well dressed girls who had opened the list of my
ceremonious callers.

Having never seen them before, my demeanor was naturally timid and
restrained, they were two sisters, and the younger one did all or most
of the talking. They were very well dressed, and altogether
non-committal, as far as speech and manners were concerned, but our
vocabulary of drawing-room chat very soon became exhausted, and with a
quiet "good afternoon" they arose and passed out.

As they left the drawing-room they were met at the door by two other
young misses who, at sight of them, raised their chins considerably
above their natural level, and swept in without condescending to
bestow even an accidental glance upon them. From where I sat I
observed all this quietly, and with an effort to suppress a smile of
bland amusement, I arose and greeted my new-comers--the Merivales!
Alice glided towards me with an air of imposing consciousness, and
thrust a tiny, gloved hand into mine, and then with a graceful gesture
she turned towards her companion and murmured faintly, "my cousin,
Miss Holgate--Miss Hampden."

I bowed and smiled, and directed them to convenient seats, the
situation was becoming more and more trying to my inclination to laugh
outright. When we were all three comfortably deposited in our chairs,
Alice Merivale turned her beaming countenance languidly towards me and
remarked that "it was a perfectly lovely aufternoon," and while I
smiled my eager corroboration, her cousin surreptitiously observed,
that it was "fairly delicious."

Then followed exclamations over my long absence, and questions too
numerous ever to require answers, they were much more finished talkers
than their predecessors, and when I thought we had touched upon every
subject which could interest us mutually, Alice asked in a most
insinuating tone if I had "known Florrie Grant before I went away to
to school?"

Florrie and Carrie Grant were the slighted heroines who had just gone
out. Fully alive to the import of her question, I affected a most
placid expression of countenance and voice, and answered that I had
not.

"I thought so," she remarked with an incisive smile, looking
significantly at her cousin, then changing her tone to one of most
provoking haughtiness, she drooped her white lids over a daintily
plush satchel she held between her hands and drawled out a languid

"How do you like her?"

I felt that I was taking in Miss Merivale's tone and words and meaning
with a wincing suspicious glance. I was being initiated, and the
sensation was so utterly different from anything I had ever
experienced before, that my self-control suffered a momentary
suspension, when words came to me I used them with a particular
emphasis.

"I think I shall like her very much," I answered, "when I have seen
more of her. I never like to judge people according to early
impressions," I continued, looking straight at the ottoman before me,
"because people so often appear to disadvantage at first," but my
arrow fell flat to the ground. Miss Merivale had not enough acumen to
detect anything personal in the innuendo; resuming her incisive smile
she exclaimed quietly

"Oh, but _some_ people you know, Miss Hampden, are always the same,
they have only one set of manners, of course I don't mean to say that
the Grants are any of these, indeed I _never do_ say _anything_
against _anyone_. Florrie, I believe, is a very nice little girl, in
her set, of course I don't know much about her as _I_ have never met
her anywhere."

"Oh, no! None of _our_ friends know her," Miss Holgate broke in with a
relish.

The elder girl frowned at this indiscreet remark, and interrupted it
with grave remonstrance, saying

"Hush, Edith! You shouldn't talk quite so plainly," then with a
wonderful tact in one so young she lit up her face with a happy
expression, appropriate to her change of subject, and asked:

"Where does Mrs. Hampden think of spending the summer, this year?"

I could vouch no information on this point, as, I had not troubled to
put the question to my step-mother myself, and so, after relating to
me in a somewhat confidential tone, all the plans and projects which
her Mama and her Aunt Ada had arranged for their holiday season, and
their strong temptation to try Riviere du Loup, where so many
fashionable people were said to be retiring just then, she finally
arose, and with an emphasized request that I would "run in" without
the least ceremony, to see her at any time, she bowed herself most
gracefully out of the room, followed by her younger and less
sophisticated relative.

I need hardly say what turn the rising tide of my impressions and
opinions took about this time. To one who had passed from the
cheerless, loveless guardianship of a worldly step-mother, into the
tender hands of patient and devoted sisters, to become, instead of a
wandering, uncared for waif, the object of the truest and holiest
solicitude that ever animated Christian hearts, this hollow mockery of
fashionable life was nothing more than a matchless absurdity.

Had I grown up to this, in the unpropitious atmosphere of my own home,
I daresay such phases of existence would have come upon me quite
naturally, and without my ever stopping to question their real or
relative solidity. But the "twig" had been differently inclined, by
hands more worthy of training tender, susceptible off-shoots. Where
can frail young innocence find a safe, secure and profitable refuge,
from the destroying influence of evil, if not within convent walls? It
is there, or nowhere, that girlhood, growing, aspiring girlhood,
ripens into a glorious womanhood. There, go hand in hand the
development of mind, and what is more necessary, if possible for a
woman, the cultivation of heart. Everyone who looks about him in the
social world, and gives a moment of calm consideration to what he sees
and hears, cannot but admit, that though surrounded by a vast field
for active and profitable labour, and with multiplied favours of
circumstances thrown in their way, our girls lead comparatively
useless lives, as if they were a recremental fraction of the human
race, than which, indeed, many are no better, since they choose to
lead such lives as can be fruitful of no direct benefit to themselves
or their fellow-mortals.

It is not because a woman is excluded (rightly or not) from the more
public arena of active life, that her energies need become paralyzed
and wasted. It is not because the popular idea of propriety would deny
her the right or opportunity to do great things for society or for the
state, in the same way as men are expected to do them, that she cannot
work her own great or little wonders in a quieter, but yet more direct
manner.

It is acknowledged that hers is the mission of the heart; it is
admitted that her sphere is in the family, and what is the mightiest
commonwealth in the world, but a family of families. Ah me! It is a
dark day with humankind when the sphere of a woman's action lies
rigidly between her toilet table and the drawing-room.

The proof that such limits as these are both unlawful and unnatural,
is, that our women who are confined within them, are conscious in
their hearts of the wrong they are doing the world and themselves.
Conscience is not yet an extinct, though it is fast becoming an
unpopular and unfashionable faculty, and men and women play the
Pharisee with a deep sense of their own worthlessness and littleness
gnawing at their spirit all the while.

I had been taught all this in time, and as early as my first vacation
at home, among the fashionable juveniles of my step-mother's circle, I
had begun to submit my valuable precepts to profitable practice. My
first callers taught me a very wholesome lesson which I have held upon
the surface of my memory through all these years.

Whenever I have witnessed a repetition of that early experience, the
past has come forcibly back to me, with all the golden admonitions of
my school-days, and I have felt myself stimulated anew, towards the
steady pursuit of those social virtues which are the outgrowth of
Christian charity, and a generous, impartial discrimination.

I have met many Alice Merivales, since my youth, who cast their
stylish shadows ominously over the lives of many a Florrie Grant, and
I have tried to sustain the weaker one, whenever it was in my power,
the evil, I regret to see, is unabating. A new generation of little
maidens is springing up around us, are they, too, destined to follow
the beaten track their elders have trodden so unworthily? Will they be
taught these nice discriminations between wealth and no wealth? Must
they, too, meet a struggling gentility with a haughty, overbearing
carriage, and elbow out less independent aspirants, whom some
capricious fortune has brought within their contact? Does one little
star in the vault above shine less brightly or twinkle less gladly
because myriads of others do likewise? After all, what vainglory need
there be in accidents of birth or fortune. They are not virtually
ours, they have been given to us, and rest upon a changing wind that,
to-morrow, may waft them far out of our Reach or sight forever.

  "All flesh is grass; and all its glory fades Like the fair flower
  dishevelled in the wind, Riches have wings, and grandeur is a
  dream!"

To attack this evil, at its root, is to expose one of the most
powerful defects of our times, for no one can deny that this spirit
which prevails among so-called well-bred people, is the evident result
of that "little learning" which is "a dangerous thing." Of this I
became more strongly convinced as I grew older.

My summer vacation was not long in coming to an end. I had whiled away
some happy hours, and days and weeks, forming fleeting pleasures and
seeing novel sights. My brother Freddie had entered very sparingly
into my pleasures, as our tastes were vastly different, and his health
on the whole rather delicate, he was a pretty boy in a sailor costume,
when I saw him after our long separation, with mild blue eyes and a
pallid countenance. He was sickly looking, with an expression of
helpless peevishness about his otherwise pleasing mouth; his hair was
wavy and of a golden colour, and his hands were thin and white, like
those of a baby girl.

His mother persuaded herself that in multiplying and dwelling upon his
complaints, she was caring for him with affectionate solicitude, and
to be told that he was not looking well, was enough to convince
Freddie that his life was hanging upon a thread, and that he must
swallow powders and pills without a question or a grimace.

One morning towards the end of August, about a fortnight before my
return to school, I heard my step-mother remark in a fretful tone that
"Freddie's old symptoms" were "beginning to threaten him again," and
that she "must send for Dr Campbell to come and see him."

I looked up with some astonishment from the book which I was reading,
and ventured to ask.

"Cannot papa cure him?"

"I suppose he could," she answered, "if he were not his father, but
Freddie won't listen to his papa's directions, and cannot be persuaded
to take the remedies he prescribes--besides," she continued
apologetically, "when your father was away last fall and Freddie had a
very miserable attack, I called in Dr. Campbell, and he cured him in a
fortnight, he is very clever," she added with slow emphasis,
straightening a fancy panel on the mantelpiece by which she stood.
There was silence for a few moments, as I went on reading.

"And he is by far the most popular person in the city," my step-mother
broke forth again, sinking into a seat near the window and folding her
arms I looked up, but did not close my book.

"Who?" I asked indifferently.

"Dr. Campbell, to be sure," she answered a little snappishly, piqued
that I had not paid more attention to her favorite subject. Still
unwilling to drop the topic without having done it fuller justice, she
went on, half in soliloquy.

"He is not married either, and has the best practice here; besides
being courted by everybody who is anything. I am confident that the
Hunters, and those people, call him in for mere trifles, just to
cultivate his friendship. I know that Laura Hunter is fairly wild
about him--and she is a chronic dyspeptic, luckily," my step-mother
added with a malicious chuckle.

"Poor girl!" I exclaimed with well feigned sympathy, "I should think
she would not care to see any one she liked under such trying
circumstances."

"Neither does she--_except Dr Campbell_--she digests him so well that
her family would like to see her live upon him altogether."

I began to see that I was serving as a target for my step-mother's
ridicule of something which wounded her jealous tendencies, she knew
that I could make no retort for or against the absent ones at whom
these sly missiles were being aimed. I knew nothing of the
circumstances so broadly treated by her, and I therefore kept silent,
and applied myself to my book with renewed interest, and left my
step-mother mistress of the field--there was no glory in the conquest,
to speak of.

Towards four o'clock of the same afternoon Freddie and I were seated
upon the library floor, matching some very irregular blocks that, when
rightly fitted together, would display to our eager eyes the vividly
coloured representations of that classic and time-honoured tale known
as the "Death and burial of Cock Robin."

We were progressing slowly, and had reached that very important part
where the "fly," as an ocular witness, gives his substantial and
straightforward evidence. I had a little narrow block between my
fingers, and was glancing carefully among the unused pieces for its
mate, repeating abstractedly all the while:

  "I, said the fly, With my little eye I saw him die."

"I, said the fly, with my little"--here the library was thrown open,
and my step-mother, accompanied by a strange gentleman, walked
laughingly into the room.

"Here are both my babies!" she exclaimed with a well feigned air of
proud maternity, as she came towards us. "Are they not good little
children?" she asked in grand condescension, looking up into the
stranger's face, then turning abruptly around she said in her formal
tone

"Amelia, this is Dr. Campbell."

I had sprung to my feet at sight of the intruders and stood distantly
in the shadow of the window curtains. I was conscious of looking
flushed and indignant, and did not relish the situation from any stand
point. The sing-song testimony of the fly was still ringing in my
ears, and I knew how very undignified and ridiculous it must have
sounded to an uninterested stranger coming in suddenly upon us in this
way.

Instead of going forward, therefore, with the careless simplicity
becoming my years, I merely inclined my head from where I stood, and
got perceptibly redder in the face. I must have looked up, since I
afterwards remembered the tall serious man standing like a dark shadow
in the doorway, but this was the only impression of him I could
recall. While he was bending over Freddie in professional solicitude,
I effected a stealthy retreat by the door that led into the garden and
saw no more of him.

In less than a month afterwards I was bending over my Algebra in the
study hall of the dear old Abbey, striving most perseveringly to
master an obstinate, unknown quantity that baffled me considerably. I
did not suspect that I was then setting myself a double task of this
nature, or that many another girl, besides myself, had first begun to
chase some "unknown" phantom through the intricate stages of life at
the same time that she was puzzling over the hidden meaning of an
algebraic equation.

I had worked at my task with a steady perseverance for nearly an hour,
but other things distracted me and I could not succeed with it. I laid
one cheek pensively in the palm of my idle hand and with the other,
which held my busy pencil, I played a random tattoo on my desk. Before
me on my paper was a confused multitude of a's and y's and z's which I
had failed to master with any satisfaction, although I had repeated
many a patient effort with placid, hopeful, good-humor.

Other thoughts quite alien to the subject I was then studying, began
to suggest themselves as a sort of refreshment to my mind. My vacation
at home among worldly people and pursuits seemed to have thrown open
before my eyes the hitherto undreamt of arena of active experience,
and whether I willed it or not my memory dwelt persistently at
intervals upon all I had seen, and heard, and done during the fleeting
summer months.

In a few moments I was far outside the limits of Notre Dame Abbey,
hovering in spirit around the neighborhood of my home, calling up
those faces and forms that had impressed me more than others. I went
back to the embarassing meeting with Dr Campbell in the library, and
as I thought over it I felt the warm blood rising within me and
suffusing both my cheeks, as it is wont to do when any of the blunders
of my life come back to me in my reverie.

What was most vexing to all in this case was that I could not resolve
my floating memories of him into any definite outline or form, he was
a mere shadow to me, that had flitted across my way for a short moment
and then left me bewildered and wondering.

I was rudely awakened from my reflections by the loud unmusical
summons of the class bell which set up a prolonged and monotonous
ringing just as I was struggling with all my vaguest and most
uncertain recollections of the much talked-of Dr Campbell.

I arose with my task undone and went listlessly down to the
class-room. I could not help the dissatisfied mood which crept over me
as I strolled lazily along the corridors and down the winding
stairway. I felt myself suspended between two distinct lives since my
return to school, two lives that ran as widely apart as the streams of
the old and new world. The common-place reality of one was a constant
and rather unwelcome intruder upon the dreamy uncertainty of the
other, and I stood midway between the powers and attractions of both,
a neutral, passive, and helpless victim.

As might be expected I was one of Sister Andre's "black sheep" or
dilatory pupils that morning. When our Algebra class was called I felt
humbled and fallen. It was the first time for many years that Amey
Hampden had been backward in her lessons, and what was worse, there
were girls in my section who had looked forward with an eager desire
to a day when my conquering spirit would be baffled.

I could detect a gathering expression of the meanest gratification on
more faces than one as I stood up to accuse myself, without any
justification whatever, of having brought my task unprepared to the
school-room. The words almost stifled me. I fain would have pleaded
illness or some other false reason for my transgression. Nothing
seemed so dreadful as to provoke a sneer from my unworthy rivals.

I could feel myself losing ground even at that moment, I, who had felt
myself so secure in my superiority, now saw myself threatened with a
most inglorious downfall--a mere trifle in the eyes of the matured and
sophisticated worldling who has had to do battle with some of the most
merciless freaks of fate, but every ambitious student knows that such
a crisis as this, under circumstances such as these, tries his moral
endurance, which is yet necessarily very limited, as severely as a
like turning-point, on a grander scale, tested that of a Caesar or a
Bonaparte.

I had made my own little conquests, and had established myself as a
leading power among my fellow-students, in a way, maybe, I took a vain
pleasure in my own successes which, after all, were only the lawful
performances of my duty, but then, it is a very plausible thing for
people to do what is expected of them now-a-days, and I had reaped a
bountiful harvest of recompense for my diligence and assiduity.

However, I now saw plainly the truth of the proverbial warning that
"Pride must have a fall," and I resolved to bear up as bravely and
worthily as my self-control would allow me. It seemed to me that
Sister Andre's tone had never been so encouraging, or so partial, as
she said:

"I see these examples are very intricate, young ladies; I am afraid I
will have to call upon Miss Hampden to solve them for us."

Some of my rivals exchanged sarcastic glances. My hour had arrived! I
stood boldly up and turned towards the dais upon which our mistress
was seated.

"I have not prepared them, Sister Andre," I answered, in a clear,
steady voice. Just then a tall, slender girl, with dark eyes and hair,
who was seated opposite to me, and whom I had never seen in our class
before, rose from her seat and went up to Sister Andre's throne. She
spoke to her in a low, inaudible tone for a few short moments, and
then went back as quietly, and resumed her place.

Sister Andre followed the stranger with a wistful glance, and then
turned her eyes upon me.

"It is all right, Amey," she said, gently, "to-morrow will do."

I sat down in a state of dumb confusion, feeling dazed and mystified.
Something urged me to affirm I had no valid reason for being excused,
and looking across towards my apparent benefactor for some vague
explanation of her conduct, I saw a re-assuring, encouraging
expression in her eyes as they met mine, so I merely smiled and said
nothing.

That evening when supper was over and the hour of recreation had
arrived, I walked to the end of the pillared hall, where our new pupil
stood gazing aimlessly out of a window that looked into our summer
play-ground, at the rear of the convent, she did not hear my
approaching step, apparently, for she never moved until I slipped my
arm gently within her own and whispered:

"I have come to thank you for the great service you have done me
to-day."

She started suddenly and looked up at me with the loveliest brown eyes
I ever saw, a smile crept into the corners of her rich red lips, which
broke asunder quietly and somewhat sadly, revealing, as they did so,
two rows of pretty, even teeth. Whether or not, I was partially
disposed to admire her on account of the sentiments with which I
approached her, I must admit that I thought I never saw such a vision
of sparkling, feminine beauty in my life as she presented at that
moment.

"Oh, Miss Hampden," she exclaimed, with a suspicion of a pretty
foreign accent "don't speak of it, please, I realized your trying
situation, and thought I knew something of the cause that provoked
it."

She had turned from the window and was toying familiarly with the blue
badge which, as a member of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin, I have
always worn, her words surprised me, and I asked with an undisguised
curiosity.

"What did you know, Miss. ----?"

"Not _Miss_" she interrupted, while I stopped, not knowing what name
to call her by, "Hortense," she emphasized, "Hortense de Beaumont,
that is my name."

"Well, Hortense, then," I repeated, "what did you know about me?"

She lifted her fine, lustrous eyes to mine, but this time they were
wistful and penetrating; then, taking my hand impulsively, she led me
to a bench that stood a little away from us, saying:

"Come and I will tell you, Amey--for I am going to call you Amey," she
put in parenthetically. We sat down, and without preamble my
interesting friend went on in her pretty foreign way to tell me the
following.

"You see, Amey," she began, "I arrived only last night at this convent
and I have come from such a long way. Oh! I was tired and _ennuyee_
when I reached here, and then every face was so strange. Oh! it was
dreadful" she exclaimed ardently, clasping her small white hands and
looking eagerly into my face. "I could not sleep at all, you may
imagine," she continued, resuming the thread of her narrative, "and
this morning I felt fatigued again and quite lonesome. I went into the
study-hall because I had nothing to do with myself, and, do you know,
Amey," she said with renewed earnestness, "when I saw you, it was so
queer, I felt sure that I knew you already. Your face was so familiar.
I looked at you all the time, while you sat bending over your task,
but you never looked at me. I was asking questions to myself about
you; I thought I should remember you, and while I was noticing you
like that, you halted suddenly in your work and began to think, and
then--oh! your face _was_ like one that I have seen somewhere, and
that I cannot now remember I knew that your thoughts had changed
quickly, and dwelt no longer on your books," she said smiling and
laying her hand gently on my two that were folded in my lap, "They
were far away, perhaps with mine, and Amey, I liked you so much then,
I did want to speak to you, but the bell just rang, and we went down
to the class-room. When Sister Andre asked for the algebra class, I
knew you would not be pleased, and looking at you eagerly, I saw
disappointment and vexation in your face. I went up then to Sister
Andre, and said 'Do not blame Miss Hampden if she is backward this
morning, it is hardly her fault. I will explain it to you better
by-and-bye, Sister,' I said, and indeed" Hortense concluded,
gesticulating prettily with both her slender hands, "it was not your
fault, as Sister Andre agreed with me when I told her of it after."

Her eyes sparkled with a _piquante_ brightness as she finished her
interesting little story. There was a rich crimson spot on each dusky
cheek, and her red lips were parted in a bewitching smile. I was
enraptured, and told her, without the slightest reserve, the whole
prospect which was looming up so darkly before me had she not come to
my rescue.

"At the same time, Hortense," I argued, "I think you like me and
sympathize with me, under a false conviction. You have surely never
seen me before, and I most certainly have never laid eyes upon you
until now. If I had, I should not be likely to forget it," I said,
insinuating something of the profound admiration, with which her
ravishing beauty inspired me, in my tone as I did so.

"O you will make me too proud, Amey!" she exclaimed so innocently,
that I leaned over and touched her peach-like cheek with my lips. She
coloured still more, as I did so. I noticed it, and I said:

"I will never tell you anything but the truth Hortense, will we be
friends enough for this?"

"Oh, yes! Surely we will be friends," she answered warmly, "not now
only, but always, will we not?" she urged warmly. I need not say how
readily I agreed, and from that moment Hortense de Beaumont and I were
all in all to each other.




CHAPTER IV


That there is some subtle sweetness in a true and stable friendship,
no one can dare deny. It is divinely ordained that men's and women's
lives will cross each other at certain stations on the long and
oftentimes tedious journey of experience, and independent of either of
them, a secret and mysterious influence, the exponent of an inherent
Christian sympathy, will work its changes on their human hearts as the
moulder on the yielding substance between his able fingers. I hold
that the friendship of which I speak is fruitful of more real
happiness in the world than any other influence of which we mortals
are susceptible, and I am well sustained in my belief.

But though so wide a field is granted to our friendship, and though it
may reveal itself under a plurality of aspects to those who seek it,
strange to say, the world knows very little about it. We speak of it
as of some regretted treasure that has been long lost to humanity. We
are half convinced that the lightning speed of modern civilization has
been too much for it, and that it is destined for time to come, to
creep on apace within the range of our backward glance, but never
within reach of our grasp.

And all the while we are only building up an opaque and dreary barrier
that will shut out much of the summer sunshine from our daily lives of
toil and trouble. Men and women who could make each other's burdens of
sorrow fewer and lighter by a mutual sympathy and devotedness, look
above each other's heads in the hurrying crowd and pass by each other,
shoulder to shoulder, wearing a mask of calm and cold neutrality over
hearts that are glowing with an unspoken kindness and affection.

"A woman," says Bulwer, "if she be really your friend, will have a
sensitive regard for your character, honor and repute. She will seldom
counsel you to do a shabby thing, for a woman friend always desires to
be proud of you. She is," he further observes, "to man _presidium et
dulce decus_, bulwark, sweetness, ornament of his existence."

And indeed his words and their import are most rational and
self-sustaining. It is no longer a matter of private or personal
opinion to decide whether the friendship of a truly good woman
benefits the man upon whom she bestows it or not. There are too many
striking arguments in her favor, thrown by the surging tide of
circumstances upon the surface of life's agitated waters, to allow a
doubt to assail her. Too often, within our own memory even, has the
slender yet firm hand of a woman been seen outstretched to snatch the
life of a brother, husband or friend from the sluggish and perilous
stream which runs slowly but surely on towards a hopeless ruin. "The
mere idea," says George Eliot, "that a woman had a kindness towards
him, spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards
hers" and "there are natures," she tells us, "in which, if they love
us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration;
they bind us over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about
us, and our sins become that worst kind of sacrilege which tears down
the invisible altars of trust. If you are not good, none is good.
Those little words may give a terrific meaning to responsibility, may
hold a vitriolic intensity for remorse." Will anyone dispute it?
Moreover, it is the teaching of the only true philosophy by which men
should regulate their interior selves: that we "love one another,"
that we mutually assist and encourage one another, that we sympathise
with each other in our joy and sustain one another in sorrow. Now,
where a natural sympathy paves the way for the practice of this lesson
of charity, how easy it is for men to bestow a beautiful living
interpretation upon the Divine ordination concerning our mutual
relationships.

The idea that a staunch and unswerving friendship is capable of
existing between two women has become quite obsolete and exploded in
our day. It is generously admitted that the frivolous tendencies which
are innate in us have too much of the upper hand to sanction any
sentiment which pre-supposes a self abnegation or exalted
disinterestedness on our part. This is a serious heresy which may
possibly be accounted for simply enough.

It is a well-attested fact, especially since the sacred precincts of
established truth have been raided by every puerile pedant and
sciolist who can handle a pen, that any absurdity whatever, so long as
it is clad "in the lion's skin" and no matter how loudly it brays, has
some fatal claim upon the rambling credulity of the multitude. And a
method of reasoning, though resting upon a general assertion which is
utterly false, has won its own disciples time and again with an easy
effort.

Even in this trifling stigma which denies us women the privilege of
being faithful to one another it is easy to see how a fraction of
truth has been led astray. It is the outgrowth of a high-sounding
syllogism, which deduces the sweeping general assertion that "all
women are traitors" from the more limited one, which is unfortunately
true and deplorable, that some women are traitors. Nevertheless, I
fail to see what relationship can possibly exist between the two parts
of the syllogism. The general is as undeniably false as the particular
is undeniably true.

I cannot conceive what pleasure human beings can derive from a
conviction into which they have coaxed themselves by earnest labor,
which has for its object the total destruction of their natural and
simple faith in their fellow creatures. We are all of us innocent
until by our words or deeds we are branded guilty And we have an
unquestionable right to the respect of other men so long as it has not
been forfeited by such actions as are reckoned misdemeanors in the
social world.

Hortense de Beaumont and I signed our treaty of friendship before we
had, either of us, awakened to a suspicion of those probable
impediments which the world is so fond of bringing face to face with
any established mutual attachment of ardent hearts. It was enough for
me that a sweet, confiding simplicity looked trustfully out of the
depths of her brown eyes and hovered with unconscious witchery around
her pretty red lips. The very way in which she raised her beautiful
chin, so hopefully, so winningly, when she talked, would have
conquered me, independent of her other attractions. Although there
were no fascinating depths to my grey eyes, and no witchery, natural
or artificial, in the smile my lips afforded, Hortense, I venture to
say, fully reciprocated the love and trust which I so earnestly
bestowed upon her. There was no uncertainty about our friendship, no
wavering, no questioning, no doubt. The embers glowed with a strong
and steady and cheerful intensity, and we sat before them basking in
their comfortable warmth, and sheltering our hearts from the chilling
coldness of the world without. Oh! these were happy days that
compensated for all the loneliness I had endured in my childhood.
After all, I had only been treasuring up my desire for companionship
and not sacrificing it, which made my sentiments only the more ardent
when an opportunity came at last to indulge them. Looking back from
that sunlit eminence upon the shadowy years of my previous life, I was
able to smile and forget everything, in the blissful consciousness
that a rare, undreamt-of happiness had overtaken me after all, and had
flooded my lot with its dazzling loveliness; and even now I see it
standing prominently above all the other varied epochs of my life I
can follow with a distinct remembrance, one day after another as they
merged into a riper period of my existence, the spot where a shadow
first came over the sunshine of our lives has never been a past to me.

I remained at Notre Dame Abbey pursuing my studies devotedly until I
was upon the threshold of my twentieth year. A letter from my father
then arrived, bidding me make whatever preparations my departure would
necessitate, that at the end of the autumn session he would come to
take me home for good. This was a sad and unexpected surprise for me.
I had just begun to be fascinated by my studies, which were now of
quite a dignified nature. I might as well add, since it cannot but
provoke a bland and suggestive smile from masculine erudition, that I
had actually taken up moral philosophy, and aspired to distinguish
myself later as a metaphysician of some repute. But alas! for the
vanity of human purposes and desires, this empty little note of my
father's came like the chillest wintry blast and smothered the small
creeping flame of my newly awakened ambition. I pleaded and prayed for
an extension of time, but the ultimate explanation was a rather
lengthy epistle from my step-mother, in which she adduced most
persuasively that "there was no help for it, that I must come home."
Canada had changed administrators, and somebody very distinguished was
expected to replace the old Governor-General. It was a most propitious
and opportune occasion for me to make my _debut_ in society, and, all
things considered, I had had quite enough instruction now to fit me
for an honorable position in the world.

How foolishly and vainly assiduous I had been! An honourable position,
according to that respectable authority, was literally no position at
all. Its preliminary stage was that of an idle pleasure-seeker; its
more progressive, that of an artful husband hunter, and its
summit--ah! its summit was where she stood herself, and where a
deplorable percentage of our society wives and mothers are standing or
strutting about with their brilliant plumage expanded, airing their
silly pride and lisping out in self-laudatory accents the story of
their empty achievements in society.

Yes, it was true for her that I had received plenty of instruction for
the mission which she had reserved for me, but in spite of her, now, I
was far outside the limit of her power over me. Not that I was
predisposed to cross her plans and wishes with an obstinate perversity
as of old. I had grown too sensible for that now; but I knew that
education always carries an unquestionable independence about with it,
which asserts itself firmly, though calmly, in the lace of polished
ignorance. I felt that I was now superior to my step-mother by right
of that cultivation, more even of heart than of mind, which had never
been bestowed upon her. The good Sisters of Notre Dame had lifted me
out of the chaos of fashionable ignorance, and had given me a forcible
impetus towards that rising hill of knowledge, whence I could look
down upon the fate I had escaped, with a proud and tender gratitude.
Without further ado, therefore, I wrote back a reply declaring that I
would be ready to leave my happy convent home at the period indicated,
and, inserting an artfully-worded hope that they would not be
disappointed with the fruits of my scholastic labors, I signed myself
their most obedient and respectful daughter.

In three months from that eventful date the gas-light of the Canadian
Senate Chamber was falling upon my white brocaded Watteau train, as I
advanced towards the throne where our courteous Governors stand every
winter, with a patience and forbearance worthy of a better cause. An
officer in glistening regimentals looked at my card through his
eyeglass, and dutifully called out "Miss Hampden," while I bowed, and
followed the motley procession of young and old, that were wending
their way to the galleries above.

I was no longer a child, no longer a school-girl in the eyes of the
world, but a "young lady" with ambitions and desires attributed to me
whether I thought of them or not.

It was late in November when I bade farewell to Notre Dame Abbey,
never more to darken its hallowed threshold as a pupil. That parting
was one of the saddest recollections which my memory treasures. Every
hall and stairway, every nook and corner of that solemn old building,
were bound to my heart by closest ties. It is strange how much deep
love we have to spare for places and things that enter largely into
our lives. For my part, I know that the dear old Abbey has a claim
upon my affections which no power on earth can lessen or destroy.

I left Hortense after me, and while she remained I was always with
her--not in flesh and blood indeed, but, better still, in heart and
mind and soul, shadowing her wherever she went, and revelling in the
same sweet companionship still, though a great distance stretched
between us.

Hortense and I said our first good-bye on the 25th of November, the
feast of the glorious Saint Catherine. The evening meal was over, and
the long procession of happy, laughing girls had passed out of the
refectory into the spacious recreation hall, where first I spoke to my
dear little friend. Hortense and I lingered behind. I had only one
hour more to spend with her, and it seemed that a great deal yet
remained unsaid. From where we stood we could plainly hear the buzz of
ringing voices in the crowded room beyond. There was unusual rejoicing
to-night, for it was a _conge_ in honor of Saint Catherine, but the
joyful confusion seemed only to throw our mutual sadness into more
pronounced relief, and for awhile we stood in silence, hand in hand,
half-shrouded in the darkness of the outer doorway. Then Hortense
said, in a tremulous whisper.

"Let us go into the chapel."

I took her arm tenderly, and we passed quietly along the dimly lit
corridor that led into the main portion of the building. A single gas
jet burned in the large square hall outside. We hurried across it, for
the glare was unwelcome to the tear-stained faces of both, all was
silent and still as death. Hortense opened the chapel door
noiselessly, and we glided in. Darkness here too, and yet not
darkness, for great giant shadows leaped over the vacant pews, and
chased one another over the cold, white keys of the organ. The
sanctuary light was flickering fitfully in its crystal bowl, and
peopling the holy precincts with phantom worshippers. Gleams of
silvery moonlight flooded the farther end, and brought out to
advantage every hoary blade and tree and flower that lay upon the
glistening window panes. If we had needed inspiration from external
things at this moment, how easily we could have received it. But there
was not a fibre within us that was not already awake to such
soul-stirring influences. We went on tiptoe towards the altar-rail,
and knelt upon the topmost step. To tell what followed would be to
intrude upon the sacredness of the soul's privacy. Suffice it to say
that for some solemn moments we knelt and prayed together, each
knowing well what to ask from Him who has promised that they who "ask
shall receive." When my petition was ended I turned and looked at
Hortense. She was praying still, her thin white hands were clasped and
rested on the rail before her. Her eyes were raised towards the
Crucifix that stood over the Tabernacle, her lips were slightly
parted, and a deep crimson spot glowed on each beautiful cheek. I
became spell-bound for a moment, wondering whether in Heaven she could
look any lovelier; but as I gazed upon her she raised her slender hand
and blessed herself. Her prayer was over and it was surely heard.

Half an hour after this I stood robed in my warm furs awaiting my
father's arrival. I had said my adieux to teachers and school-mates,
and was now drying my eyes for the hundredth time in expectation of a
summons to leave hurriedly. At last there was a stamping of horses'
hoofs on the cold, frozen ground outside, followed by a violent
ringing of the door-bell. The hour had come.

I stood hastily up. Now that the end was near where was the use of
delay. I took Hortense's tearless face between my trembling hands and
stooped to kiss her for the last time. I had determined to be brave at
this moment but I said "good-bye" in a broken sob and two large tears
fell upon her pale cheeks from my quivering lashes. She did not brush
them away but looking earnestly into my eyes said in a low eager voice
as though she were finishing her thought aloud.

"And we will always be friends like this, Amelia, in spite of distance
or anything?"

"Always," I answered as her lips lay upon mine and then we parted.




CHAPTER V.


From the quiet, peaceful routine of a convent life I was whirled into
the maddest and wildest confusion, at least such did it seem to me
then, when I was unsophisticated, and ignorant of the ways in which
fashionable womanhood develops itself.

My step-mother went through my wardrobe making incredible additions
and alterations, informing me as she did so that I would be the
cynosure of many searching eyes when I appeared in the drawing-rooms
which she frequented. I also received many graceful hints as to what
was expected of me in conversation and demeanour, and I did not need
any assistance whatever to realize that I was a sort of speculation,
that I would carry an insinuation of my father's wealth and my
mother's position about with me wherever I went. I was not given to
understand or to fear that my own intrinsic worth would likely be the
object of any serious consideration. My step-mother encouraged me by
saying that "Alice Merivale was out before me and was quite a success,
and all I had to do was to renew my early friendship with her" or in
other words to play the parasite as prettily as I knew how. About
this, however, I had made up my mind before I appeared in the busy
arena of fashionable society. Twice a week now I put on some of my
expensive new toilets and went with my step-mother in our handsome
conveyance to make calls. I was presented to every one of any note,
and drank tea in the best drawing-rooms the Capital could boast of. So
far my step-mother looked happy. I had not been awkward at
introductions, nor dull in conversations. I had even made some very
pithy remarks where they could do me most service, and knew the name
of a historic personage to whom Lady Pendleton alluded vaguely,
forgetting his title. I was invaded in my turn on our reception day by
all the wealth and beauty of the capital. Great, pompous dames in
heavy mantles and rustling robes sat themselves down in imposing
condescension beside me to discuss the last dinner party at Government
House, or recite a series of domestic woes brought on by that
refractory necessity--the cook. Simpering young ladies, and simpering
ladies that were no longer young, greeted me with a pretty,
patronizing courtesy, and smiled upon my remarks as sweetly as we
grown people do at the crude observances of a prattling child.

There was a time I must admit when I was only a child in the eyes of
some of these maidens. When I was ten and they were twenty how far
apart we stood in sympathies and tastes? But it is astonishing how
rapidly youth overtakes maturity. Although the inevitable disparity of
years can never be altered or overcome, the material differences which
necessarily accrue from it are easily mastered.

So far, the course of my new life ran smoothly and calmly on, but an
impediment was looming up in the near distance. Mrs. Hartmann's cards
were out for her annual brilliant "At Home." Every one was whispering
about and speculating in a hopeful way, as people do when a grand
social event of this nature is on the _tapis_. My step-mother spent
the whole of the day before among her fragments of small finery,
re-arranging tumbled laces and trimmings, and sorting her handsome
jewels. I gave my afternoon leisure to Hortense, writing her a most
minute and graphic account of my initiation into fashionable life, my
progress and its probable result.

When the eventful night came and the gas was lighted all was hurry and
flurry and confusion in our home. My step-mother and I repaired to our
rooms in quiet walking costumes which we had worn in the afternoon,
and an hour or so later we emerged in the fullest ball-toilet. I was
ready first, and gathering up my expensive train of satin and oriental
lace, I glided across the hall and tapped at my step-mother's bedroom.

In answer to a faint "come in," I admitted myself just in time to see
the faithful Janet bestowing her attention upon the bare, plump
shoulders of her mistress, who stood before her cheval glass in silent
self-contemplation.

She had only to fasten a necklet of diamonds at her throat, to gather
up her gloves and lace hand-kerchief and allow Janet to wrap her up in
her downy opera cloak, and she was ready. As she turned from the glass
her gaze fell fully upon me. I could see that she was not
disappointed, but her generous admiration in no way interfered with
the consciousness which filled her of her own superior dignity and
grace. She may have envied me my youth, for she was loth to grow old
among these gay distractions, however, she only said "you'll do nicely
Amelia" and we left the room.

We went down to the dimly-lit drawing-room where a cheerful fire
burned in the polished grate, and my stepmother rang for tea. The
little French parlor maid appeared a moment later and laid the tiny
table beside us. Two steaming cups stood invitingly on the tray, but
before taking hers my step-mother suddenly remembered she had left her
jewel case unlocked, and she hurried out of the room in a state of
anxious excitement. I turned my back to the fire and in utter
abstraction riveted my gaze upon the butterfly handles of the teacups.
I was thinking. Such circumstances as these always brought back my
simple yesterdays with a renewed force to my memory. I was thinking so
profoundly that I neither heard nor saw my father, who had appeared in
the doorway and was standing on the sheep-skin rug looking strangely
at me.

I must have felt the power of his steady gaze, for suddenly and almost
involuntarily, I raised my eyes and beheld him leaning against the
polished casement, the heavy red curtain over the entrance hanging
loosely and gracefully behind him, making an effective background for
his white hair and pensive face.

Seeing my reverie broken, he strode noiselessly across the room and
stood beside me at the fire. The thought crossed my mind that there
was something unusual in his manner and expression to-night. He passed
his hand wearily over his brow and eyes, and as if in helpless
obedience to some uncontrollable impulse he leaned forward and touched
his firm dry lips to my cheek.

I started, and why should'nt I? It was the first time my father had
ever kissed me, at least so long as I could remember. I felt a deep
blush creeping up to my very ears; in fact I was stupidly agitated,
and he saw it. With a tenderness such as his voice had not known for
many a year he said:

"Amey, you are a living, breathing vision of my happy past, to-night.
I never saw such a likeness before." His words sank into a whisper as
my step-mother's footfall sounded on the stairs outside. He heard it,
and turning away left the room abruptly. I drank my cup of tea and
prepared to leave as one moving about in a dream. This was one of the
strangest experiences I had ever had; some secret spring seemed to
have been magically touched within me, and all the pent-up love and
devotion of a life-time now flowed freely through my veins. I was
attracted most powerfully towards the cold, distant man whom I had
dreaded all along, and whom I could have hated ardently had it not
been a sin against nature.

His words, though vague, had a clear and holy meaning for me. He must
then have loved my dear dead mother, I thought fondly, when twenty
years of separation have not effaced her memory from his heart and
mind.

I was busy with these reflections as we drove through the streets of
the city towards the Hartmann's residence, and I alighted at their
door with my eyes full of unshed tears. How strangely at odds we can
be with the circumstances of our daily lives.

Very soon, however, I was obliged to dispel all such personal and
intimate ruminations. I was no longer my own property to dispose of as
I willed. I was standing in the doorway of the spacious ball-room with
a circle of new-made gentlemen acquaintances around me; my father and
his wife stood a short distance from me and watched the proceedings
without looking at them.

"May I have the fifth Miss Hampden," the very good-looking Mr.
Haliburton was asking with a smile.

"What is the dance?" I interrupted as he was about to scribble his
initials.

"A polka," he replied with sweet urbanity. I shook my head negatively
and tried to look pleasantly sorry. He raised his perfect dark
eye-brows in thorough astonishment and put in an exclamatory "Why?"

"No fast dances," I said in a seriously playful tone, "I will give you
the sixth, it is a lancers."

"Oh, this is too bad," he argued earnestly, "however," he continued
with his peculiar, winning smile, "I am thankful for any." He wrote
his name very badly on my programme, and mine on his, then with a most
graceful bow made way for a new petitioner.

I had nearly the same little dialogue with each hero that addressed
me, and as there were but four slow dances on the programme for the
evening, I was soon in a trying dilemma. Amiable and courteous as
these fashionable lions were acknowledged to be, they could not get
themselves to sacrifice the pleasure, great or small, which they found
in a waltz or polka, to sit the dance out quietly with a girl of
scruples and principles.

I had to be satisfied, therefore, with the conviction that I was
doomed to spend the greater part of the evening alone; and what was
more consoling still, this being my first appearance at a ball, I was
sure to be closely watched by many a fair rival. Already the music for
the opening dance was sounding. I was engaged for this one, and had
for my vis-a-vis my step-mother and an imposing gentleman in heavy
regimentals. My partner was an ordinary man of the period, of medium
height, with common-place moustache and neatly trimmed side-whiskers,
who made several differently worded remarks of the same meaning upon
the same subject.

I was disposed not to enjoy this evening for many reasons, and I was
conscious of going through the figures of the dance automatically and
tastelessly. I came back after each lady's chain to my tiresome
partner, wishing earnestly that it would soon be over. My step-mother
detected my listless manner, and came to me later, when the dance was
ended and I had been left by the amiable Mr. Fawcett standing before a
picture of Siddons which I was ostensibly admiring with enthusiasm.
There was a becoming smile on the lace of my step-mother, as there
always was in fashionable company, but there was no sweetness in the
anger which was interpreted by the quick, impatient words that flashed
from behind the glittering plumes of her splendid fan into my ear:

"Don't make an idiot of yourself," she said, hoarsely, coming up to
me, and standing in a well-studied attitude before the picture I was
looking at. "It is unpardonable vulgar and rude of you to take
exception to any dances on the programme, as if Mrs. Hartmann would
allow any impropriety where her own daughters are concerned." She went
on fanning herself briskly, showing nothing of her indignation in her
face.

Without raising my eyes I answered quietly: "Do not excite yourself
for nothing, you may be sure I shall not disgrace you, but I am
determined not to get into the arms of any of these men to-night."

She moved away while I was speaking and I saw no more of her until we
were preparing to leave. During the dances that intervened between the
quadrille and the lancers, that I had given to Mr. Haliburton, I had
amused myself as best I could, talking to some prosy relatives of the
family who stood around the walls, and turning over the leaves of an
artistic scrap-book that lay upon the broad window-sill at one end of
the room.

I was grateful when Mr. Haliburton came and took me away into the
crowd. I was beginning to feel tired of the situation and to wish I
were safely at home.

The second dance, however, was livelier than the first. My partner was
a vivacious flirt who made every one feel merry for a while, and I
began to enjoy it after we had gone through the first figure. We were
slower than the dancers next to us, who had finished and were waiting
for us, to change the music. I was advancing to my vis-a-vis, looking
around the room at the same time, when my eyes suddenly fell. I saw
someone in the distance watching my movements, someone who had
evidently just come in. He was not a young man, and yet he was hardly
old. I had not time to take further notice of his appearance, for the
music ceased and we began the last frolicsome figure of our dance. As
I passed into the conservatory later on Mr. Haliburton's arm I stole a
glance towards the end of the room where this "somebody" had been
standing, but he was gone. I need not have felt concerned and yet I
did. More than that, I was disappointed, and it was with an unfeigned
weariness and impatience that I threw myself into the low, basket
rocking-chair under a canopy covered with ivy to which Mr. Haliburton
conducted me.

I was glad to see him go from me, though it was but for a moment; I
would have time to reason with myself before he came back with the
ices.

When I found myself alone, I no longer checked the heavy sigh that had
lain heavy in my breast all night. I leaned my head back against the
vine-clad pillar behind me and almost sobbed. I was feeling miserable.
A footfall somewhere made me spring into an erect, sitting posture
again. I took an ivy leaf between my fingers and toyed nervously with
it I waited for a confirmation of my worst fears, that my step-mother
had followed me and heard me sigh, but there was no one. When all was
quiet again I ventured to look carefully around. The secret was out,
on a rustic bench at the other side of my graceful canopy "somebody"
was sitting alone. His profile met my full view, his pensive half-sad
profile. I looked at it for a moment and, springing up, I moved aside
my rocking chair and rushed towards him.

"Mr. Dalton!" I cried out impulsively, and then stopped suddenly
short--what if it were not he at all?

He turned and caught me in my attitude of suppressed excitement, the
bench was between us. He held out both hands over its curved back
saying:

"Amey, is it you?"

There was a strange look as of a misty uncertain pleasure in his eyes.
I gave him my small hands, for they were small when he had gathered
them into his, and we looked at one another in silence for a few
moments.

"Come here and sit down beside me little one," he said in his old
affectionate way. "How you have grown!" he exclaimed, moving one end
of the rustic seat to let me pass. I had forgotten all about Mr.
Haliburton or any one else but Mr. Dalton; the glad surprise of seeing
him absorbed every other consideration.

"Yes, but not changed, am I?" I put in, eagerly, sitting down beside
him and looking earnestly into his gravely glad face.

"Yes, you are very much changed Amey," he said in a serious yet tender
voice, "but," he continued slowly, "I should recognize you all the
better for the change." His words were meaningless to me, but then
they had always been so when we were friends long ago. "You are
changed too Mr. Dalton," I retorted reciprocatingly. "At first I did
not know you at all, and it was only by rude staring that I managed to
remember you. Where have you been all this time, that I have never
seen you?" I asked.

"Rambling all over the world," he answered dreamily. "And so you
missed me, did you?" he added, changing his tone to one of playful
enquiry. "Well, Amey, so have I missed you, at least I have often
thought of you in my travels and wondered how you were getting on. I
need not tell you," he continued teasingly, "how often I have been
haunted by the dreadful threat you made when I saw you last about--"

"Now, don't say any more," I interrupted, "I remember all that well
enough. We are all a little silly sometime in our lives," I alleged in
self defence.

"Poor Amey!" he said almost in a whisper, "you do not know how prone
human nature is to folly--yet, when you are as old as I, you will have
learned something of it."

"You speak as if you were very ancient," I exclaimed, making little of
his serious talk.

"Well," he broke in slowly, "I can't be very young now, when I had
Amey Hampden on my knee some fifteen years ago, but do not tell that
of me, like a good child," he added in playful eagerness "for, being a
bachelor yet, you see, it might harm me."

"Do you mean that it would excite formidable jealousies?" I asked
rising, and laughing carelessly, and then, half sorry for having
uttered these words I diverted his attention from them by announcing
my wish to go inside.

He arose, and accompanied me, with as much active gallantry as if he
had been twenty-five years younger. Leaning on his strong, stalwart
arm, I passed into the crowded and confused ball-room feeling
peculiarly revived, and strangely happier than when I had left it a
short half-hour before. But I could not get rid of a suspicion that
was forcing itself into my mind with regard to Mr. Dalton. There was
certainly some restraint over him, and the look in his clear, soft
blue eyes was not so steady as it used to be. And yet, what could I
expect from him more than he had given me? I did not know, but it
seemed that after our long, long separation, he ought not to be so
quiet and silent. It is true that our place of meeting was a rather
unpropitious one, but this did not satisfy me. He was not quite the
Mr. Dalton that I remembered, that, as a child I had loved, and still
I felt proudly happy to lean on his powerful arm and exchange
occasional glances and remarks with him.

We walked through the ball-room where amusement was now at its zenith,
and when we had reached the upper end Mr. Dalton paused and looked at
the gay scene before us. He had seemingly forgotten me, while his
thoughts were busy with their own weaving. We had only been there a
moment when my father advanced towards me accompanied by another
gentleman.

"Amey," he began before he had quite reached me, "have you forgotten
our friend Dr. Campbell."

I was sensibly confused as I withdrew my hand from Mr. Dalton's arm to
give it to Dr. Campbell. I bowed and smiled as at our first
introduction in the library at home, and I fear I was guilty even of
blushing, too.

Mr. Dalton, seeing my attention diverted, bowed himself gracefully
away. My father had vanished before him, and thus was I left
completely at the mercy of a trying circumstance.

Dr. Campbell broke the awkward silence happily, saying:

"It cannot be for want of an introduction, Miss Hampden, that you and
I are not friends."

"No indeed," I answered stupidly, not knowing very well what to say.

"Are you dancing this evening," he next asked, in a most composed tone
which made me envy him.

"Very little," said I. "I am exclusive on that subject."

"Which means that you will not honour me," he interrupted blandly,
looking questioningly into my face.

"Oh, no!" I exclaimed seeing how misinterpreted my words were. "I mean
with regard to the dances, not the people. I do not like fast dances."

"Neither do I particularly," he answered, offering me his arm, "except
when I sit them out. May I?" he asked in such a graceful deferential
way that I know I smiled approvingly as I slipped my hand within his
arm and went with him into the little ante-room opposite, where coals
glowed in the open fire-place and a soft rose-coloured light fell over
all the delicate splendor of the furnishings.

There were two heavy plush arm-chairs already drawn up to the fender,
and Dr. Campbell moving one gently towards me, smilingly remarked that
"we were evidently expected."

I took one and he sank into the other with a gesture of pronounced
ease. The light from the fire was full upon his face and form, and
feeling secure in the shadow of a fancy screen that had been shoved
beside my chair, I set myself earnestly to work to analyse this
wonderful man.

He was passively handsome, with a large brow and very large,
expressive eyes. They were blue, too, but not like Mr. Dalton's. They
were dreamier and more attractive. His face was quite bronzed, and his
fine mouth was admirably set off by well-curved brown moustaches. His
chin was bare but for one little bit under the lower lip. He was
caressing this seeming favorite with one white, slender hand, almost
fine enough for a lady's, while I observed him with keen scrutiny. He
was an English Canadian, I learned that before I ever saw him, born
and bred under Canadian skies, but this implies little of his bias or
disposition.

Canada has not yet shaken off the fetters of her great grandparents
sufficiently to bring out in a clear, marked way her own
individuality. Her native sons and daughters inherit too faithfully
the English, Irish, Scotch or French tenor of the characters of their
predecessors to be able to grant to our ambitious country the national
peculiarities and idiosyncracies which she covets, in order to assert
herself freely, as the mother of a people who bear her resemblance
stamped upon their mental and moral features. When a country has
succeeded in fixing a seal upon the brow of every son that is born to
her, she has secured the right of being paralleled, at least in one
respect, with the greatest nations of the world. In time, Canada will
accomplish this, for Canadians should be wonderful people. It baffles
her to-day, because it is a question of time, and in her incapacity to
influence time, Canada is only equal to Caesar's Rome, or Victoria's
Great Britain.

There was a look of keen intelligence in Dr Campbell's countenance
that pleased me particularly, something so refreshing to see, after
all the vapid expressions of uneducated men. I could easily understand
now, how he gained that _prestige_ which made conquests for him
wherever he went. Truly, I did not believe him a very widely informed
man, but he was a man of fixed principles and a man of ambition.
Moreover he had a wonderful _savoir-faire_ that carried him through
all sorts of adventitious circumstances gracefully. It is a clear
counterfeit of genuine acumen, and, with a world that knows no better,
gets just as much favor and praise.

During the fifteen minutes that we passed together in Mrs. Hartmann's
cosy morning-room, with our feet on her polished brass fender, we
learned much of one another's hidden selves, that people who had known
us both for years had failed to gather.

I went to supper on Dr. Campbell's arm and gave him a rose from my
bouquet. He saw us to our carriage when we were leaving, and promised
to call on the following Tuesday.

This is a lengthy and tedious summary of my first and last ball.

For I never went to another. What was the use? I was essentially out
of place with my principles about dancing. My step-mother stormed and
raged after the Hartmann's At Home, declaring that I had disgraced
myself and her; that such guests as I, were a burden to a hostess and
an infliction on the rest of the company. All this, along with my own
private conclusions, went far towards helping me to make up my mind,
once for all, that I had gone to my last "dance." And to be candid I
must admit that it was no effort whatever for me to abstain from these
would-be pleasures. They were literally not worth the fuss and trouble
and expense of getting to them. But I went to other gatherings which
were infinitely more enjoyable. I had many another _tete-a-tete_ with
Arthur Campbell before the winter was out. The last attraction before
Parliament closed was a "Musical" at the Merivales.




CHAPTER VI.


Alice Merivale had "come out" with the greatest eclat into our social
circles. With wealth and beauty, grace and a certain number of showy
accomplishments, she had made conquests without the slightest effort
on her part. She was a finished musician, and had a sweet, thrilling
voice. She talked pleasant nonsense, danced beautifully, flirted very
artfully, and altogether seemed the living embodiment of every
attribute which is calculated to endear a human creature to its
fellow-men. She even gave a peculiar tone to the circle she moved in,
and it was quite a forcible guarantee that a gathering was select and
most exclusive if Alice Merivale was present.

When I returned the second time from school to prepare myself for a
public life Alice Merivale was the first to call upon me. She came in
quite unceremoniously one morning, looking very beautiful in a
sealskin mantle and hat, and declared in the prettiest manner possible
that we must be great friends; we lived so near and had known each
other for such a long time that there should not be anything like
ceremony between us.

"I shall almost need you now that Aunt Ada is married and Edith has
gone to Germany" she argued in pretty plaintiveness.

I liked this, though indeed, at the time it surprised me more than a
little. I had expected to find her developed into a feather-brained,
affected young lady who was shortsighted in a great many ways. I had
never been able to dissociate the early impression she made on me from
her later redeeming phases. Poor Florrie Grant vanishing out of the
doorway under Miss Merivale's sublime contempt came back to my memory
time and again, and I made up my mind that Alice Merivale and I could
never claim to be kindred souls.

But when I saw her after the lapse of some years and observed the
perfection of her physical loveliness I could no longer harden my
heart against her. It has always been a weakness of mine to slavishly
admire feminine beauty. There is a witchery about graceful curves, and
heavy eyelids, drooping lashes and dimpled chins that stronger souls
than mine cannot resist; and when the haughty little Alice of my
girlhood stood before me in all the glory of her fresh and beautiful
womanhood I forgave her all the past.

I hardly knew what she talked about, so rapturously did I gaze, now
upon her delicate pink ear, now upon the melting curves that brought
her white chin into provoking notice, then her roguish, winning,
violet eyes with their long dark lashes and languid brows. There was
everything to love in her so far as the eye could see, from the waving
profusion of golden hair to the toe of her dainty slipper.

I had met her at all the entertainments of the season. I had watched
her pretty manoeuvres and followed her flirtations with a quiet
amusement. Her admirers were numberless and pursued her with the most
emphatic devotedness. She was an item in the individual lives of young
people of both sexes, exciting in some hearts the bitterest envy and
jealousy, and kindling the name of an all-consuming love in many
others. She had earned the palm of triumph and victory all through the
gay season, and now that the end was near she decided to gather all
those who had witnessed her conquests abroad, within her own home and
there make her retiring courtesy under peculiarly advantageous
circumstances. She was to leave in a fortnight after for an extended
tour through Europe.

It was the fifteenth of March and the Merivales' "Musical" was to
commence at eight o'clock. The wind blew fiercely through the stiff,
naked boughs of the giant maples, and drifted the light powdery snow
madly on before it. I had been in-doors all day listening to the weird
wailing of the ceaseless wind as it whistled down the chimneys and
swept past the house corners. I had written and read and stitched
until my eyes were wearied and my fingers numb, and it was only four
o'clock, that turning-point on a March day from the sunshine to the
gloaming when we women know not what to do with ourselves; when it is
too cold to go out or expect visitors, too late in the day to begin
any occupation, too dark to read with any comfort, and too early to
light the lamps. I went to the window and looked impatiently into the
street but there was no comfort to be had there; a milkman's wagon
stood over the way, his horse pawing the frozen ground while he filled
his measure with the cold white liquid. A band of little children ran
screaming by with a large dog drawing a sleigh; a beggar woman clad in
flimsy rags was mounting the steps of a neighboring house, and that
was all. I shrugged my shoulders and turned away with a smothered
yawn. The piano stood open before me, I threw myself carelessly on the
stool and thrummed languidly on the key-board for a moment or so, but
I was not in the humor to play, and with another yawn I arose, crossed
the hall and passed into my father's library.

He was usually there at this hour, but early that afternoon he had
gone into the country to see a patient, and as he would not be back
until after dinner, I appropriated his sanctum in his stead. A fire
burned in the grate, not a roaring blazing fire, but a pile of
steadily glowing coals, intensely red and hot, that kept the room
comfortable, but threw no shadow on the tinted walls.

I wheeled the light lounge that stood opposite the door towards the
fire, and sank gratefully into it to have a little "think" about the
past, all to myself. I began to distinguish the spires of Notre Dame
Abbey rising clearly out of the glowing embers. Faces that I loved
peeped through its latticed windows, smilingly, and voices that were
like the breath of summer in my ear called to me from its hallowed
portals. I was back among the scenes of my early happiness, the winter
day was flooded with summer warmth and sunshine; the birds twittered
in the fresh green foliage, and the stream murmured placidly on at the
foot of the convent garden. My languor and weariness were gone; I was
cheerful and glad again, as I had been in my careless girlhood. How
long it lasted according to time reckoned by minutes and hours, I knew
not. In my dream many days came and went with new and repeated
delights. All I know is, that when I awoke the room was shrouded in
darkness and the fire had grown cheerless and dull I started up, for
the change was a shock to me. I did not know I had fallen asleep, and
it must have been a full hour or more since I came into the library.
More than that, I felt a sharp sensation for which I could not
thoroughly account. For a moment I suspected that some one must be in
the room, then again, the unbroken stillness re-assured me that this
was mere fancy. I felt an abiding presence which seemed to hover right
around me. I raised myself on one elbow and asked in an audible
whisper:

"Is anyone here?"

A coal gave way in the fire-place and the embers loosened and fell. I
started involuntarily, but there was no answer to my question. I
rubbed my eyes briskly and stood up. As I did so, something fell upon
the floor with a clinking noise. I put my hand up instinctively to my
ears. One ruby ear-ring was missing. I groped my way to the
mantel-piece and struck a light. Stepping carefully back towards the
lounge, with my eyes buried in the carpet, I spied a glittering object
at a little distance from where I had been standing. I stooped and
picked it up. To my great surprise it was not my ruby ear-ring. It was
a small oval locket suspended from a few links of a heavy gold chain,
one of the uppermost links was crooked and broken.

I turned it over and over between my fingers, holding the candle so
that the light fell full upon it. It was not my father's; of that I
was fully certain. It had a strange, unfamiliar look about it such as
other people's small wares always have for us, and yet, the more I
examined it, the more I began to think I had seen it somewhere before.
I was mystified. As I turned my head I descried my missing ear-ring
lying in the threads of a crocheted tidy that had lain under my head.
Setting down the candle, I extricated it and restored it to my ear. I
then blew out the light and went quietly up to my own room.

I had just closed the door and secured myself against possible
intrusion when the sound of the dinner-bell broke upon my ear. I
immediately rose, and storing my newly found treasure hurriedly away,
I went down to the dining-room.

My step-mother was already there, chatting with Mrs. Hunter, who had
come in to spend a quiet hour of the afternoon, and accepted an
informal invitation to dinner.

My father had not yet returned, and as Freddie was still at college,
we were quite a cosy little dinner party in ourselves.

I apologized for my delay, accusing myself of having fallen asleep,
and with a smiling enquiry about the general health of the Hunter
family I took my seat and began to unfold my table-napkin.

"Then you did not see what came for you this afternoon, if you've been
dozing," my step-mother said pouring a ladle of soup into Mrs.
Hunter's plate.

I looked eagerly towards her and exclaimed with a smile of surprise:

"No! Did anything come?"

My step-mother glanced significantly at Mrs. Hunter, but that lady was
either very hungry or saw no fun in the allusion, for she went on
quietly tasting her soup without looking up.

This piqued my step-mother a little, I fancy, for she said with
unusual emphasis and insinuation.

"Oh, you won't be at all surprised, Amelia, it is only what you might
expect now, some more of Dr. Campbell's kind attentions, that's all."

"What is it?" I put in with an uncontrollable relish and curiosity.

"_This_ time," said my step-mother, "it is a box of the loveliest
flowers, for to-night of course."

"Dr. Campbell is very thoughtful," Mrs. Hunter here ventured to
assert, "he often sends Laura books and flowers and such pretty songs;
he is a great favorite," she added, half satisfied no doubt that she
had knocked all the sentiment out of this offering to me. But my
step-mother was not to be baffled even if she had to show me to the
highest advantage.

"Oh!" she answered, with an effort at indifference, "he knows how to
be a favorite. In his profession, especially, it is far better to
court popularity in this way. I would say he studied his own interest
in Amey's case too," she continued, spitefully, "only that he knows,
since Freddie went away, we never have any strange doctors for the
household. What do you say, Amey?" she asked in a teasing tone,
changing the nature of the subject.

"I am sure I cannot presume to interpret Dr. Campbell's motives," I
answered quietly, "but there is no reason why his gift should not be
one of friendship," I added, with conscious dignity.

Mrs. Hunter's "Of course not" put an end to this sensitive topic. It
was dangerous ground and could lead to mischief. So we all thought, I
fancy, for by tacit consent it was dropped for the rest of the meal.

After dinner we had a tame little chat in the drawing-room over our
cups of tea, and then Mrs. Hunter left, for she too had to dress for
the "Musical," and there was now not much time to spare.

Arthur Campbell's flowers were truly lovely. When I went up to my room
I saw them laid out before me, and, I must confess, I felt a little
flattered at this mark of preference from one who was so highly
esteemed by all who knew him. I raised them tenderly and examined them
one by one. They were rich and delicate and sweet smelling.

There was a little card among them with the words "Will Miss Hampden
favor the giver by wearing these flowers this evening?" neatly written
upon it; below them the clear signature "V. Arthur Campbell," was
inscribed in the same loose but neat characters.

I could not help smiling while I dressed. Maybe I was a little
conceited, but no one saw me.

The circumstances of our introduction and acquaintanceship,
altogether, were so very peculiar that I could not dwell upon them
with a sober face. Besides, Arthur Campbell was a lion in society, a
success in his profession and the desired of many calculating mothers.
What would these people say if I quietly stepped inside them in Arthur
Campbell's favor?

I took up his flowers and began to choose those I should wear. After
all, I thought, it was not always wealth and beauty that accomplished
the greatest things. I might surprise our little world yet, though my
face had no extraordinary beauty, nor my form any marvellous
grace--with which hypothesis I laid a rich spray upon my breast and,
finding it becoming, fastened it there.

Ah me! how vain and foolish our weak humanity can be at times! Some
little unexpected circumstance gives us a key-note, and we sustain it
through a heart-stirring melody that will never charm our ear save in
this misty reverie. We girls of one-and-twenty summers are so easily
borne along by every passing breath of unstable experience; so easily
stimulated by rivalry that begins in little things but may yet creep
into the great crises of our lives; so easily stung to impulsive
action by the incisive smile and word of jealousy or pride; so easily
led away by aspects that show us only their bright and cheerful side;
so easily wearied of the happy, careless monotony of our young lives!
And yet, there is an exquisite pleasure for us in the weaving of those
delicate golden webs that are destined to be torn so rudely asunder by
a prosy and matter-of-fact reality.

The thoughts suggested by Arthur Campbell's gracious offering took a
firm and exclusive hold of my mind, from the moment I saw it, until I
sat beside him in the Merivales' vast drawing-room.

He looked handsomer than ever that night, it seemed to me, as he came
smiling towards me and asked leave to take the vacant chair beside me.
Every one was busy talking and laughing, for the music had not yet
begun and we felt quite secure in our remote corner to say and do as
we pleased. It is so often quite easy to be alone in a crowd.

"I need not ask you how you are, Miss Hampden," Arthur Campbell began,
sinking down carelessly into his seat, "your looks are perfect."

"Such unworthy adulation Dr. Campbell!" I exclaimed in mock
indignation, "besides" I said, with some malice "I would like to know
how many times you have paid this compliment before it reached me."

"This is very unfair, Miss Hampden" he retorted with a pleasant smile.
"Upon my honor, I did not--well yes, to be candid, I said something
like it to Miss Merivale, but she is the only one beside yourself."

"I knew it!" I interrupted triumphantly "and I daresay she is the only
lady you have spoken to at all, since you came in, except myself."

He looked at me with his solemn blue eyes for a moment and then said
in a half jesting, half earnest, tone:

"I wish I could make you jealous."

He did not turn away his eyes after this, but let them jest in calm
scrutiny upon my half averted countenance. There was a power in his
words that thrilled me for a second or so. I may have betrayed some
agitation in my answer. I closed my fan and opened it again nervously
before I replied:

"Have you heard that I am easily provoked to jealousy?"

"Not at all," he said in quite a serious voice, "and if I heard it a
thousand times I could not believe it. You are too sure of yourself to
give way to such a sentiment."

"But we cannot rely very much upon ourselves under some
circumstances."

"Very true, and very fortunately, for we resolve to support attitudes
under some circumstances, that are neither true to ourselves, nor fair
to our fellow-creatures. Don't you think so?" he asked, taking my fan
out of my lap and looking intently at it.

"I don't think I understand you very well," I answered timidly.

Just then the sounds of voices were hushed, and the loud strains of
Rossini's _Semiramide_ filled the room. That ended our conversation
for awhile. The music proceeded with little or no intermission, for
upwards of an hour. All the vocal and instrumental talent of the city
was present, and the audience was treated to a rare and most happily
rendered repertoire. Miss Hartmann had just finished an Arietta of
Beethoven's, which was rapturously received, when Alice Merivale stole
up behind me, radiant in pale green mist--as it seemed to me--to ask
how I enjoyed the selections.

I could scarcely think of answering her until my eyes had taken in the
full beauty of her face and form.

"I want you all to be in a very good humour, before I begin" she said
coquettishly, "for I will try your patience very hard, yours
especially, Dr. Campbell," she added, looking at him now for the first
time, "you are such a merciless critic--a perfect epicure in music."

He smiled languidly at her, and swept a glance over her from head to
foot.

"Is it any wonder" he asked lazily; "when you spoil us by feasting us
with the perfection of every sort of loveliness, what else can you
expect?"

She touched him smartly on the nose with a roll of music she held in
her hand--for they were old friends--and flitted away, saying:

"It is a good thing that I have never had any faith in men of your
profession."

He looked after her in undisguised, ardent admiration. I saw it, and
if I remember well, a vague wish was creeping into my heart at the
time, that I had been as lithe and fair a creature as Alice Merivale.
Before I had dwelt much upon it however, silence was again restored
and our charming hostess had appeared before us.

Low and sweet, the first thrilling notes came from her swan-like
throat; then a strain of violin accompaniment and loud chords from the
piano, and she broke forth into a passionate refrain that held her
listeners spell-bound.

I had ceased to look at her, and was busy watching the expression on
Arthur Campbell's face. It was one of profound admiration. His eyes
were riveted upon her with a devouring look, he was lost to every
surrounding, dead to every influence for the time being but the magic
power of this beautiful voice that trembled in the scented air and
died away into a musical whisper.

She bowed and retired as the pent up emotions of her audience had
given way; exclamations of praise and enthusiasm greeted her on every
side.

She deserved all this and more, if it were possible to give it to her.
I had been enraptured myself over her singing, but still I could not
see the necessity or appropriateness of Arthur Campbell's prolonged
ecstacy. I began to think it was affected, and turned away from him to
talk to a little lady with gold-rimmed spectacles who sat quietly on
the other side of me.

When I addressed her she raised her glasses and wiped her eyes with a
dainty lace handkerchief.

"Very beautiful, was it not?" I said, for want of something more
appropriate.

"Ah! mon Dieu! oui!" she exclaimed warmly, and then proceeded to tell
me in very broken English that "Mees Alice" was the pupil of her
deceased sister, who had come from France some years before and had
undertaken the vocal instruction of _haut ton_ young ladies, in order
to save their aged mother from a destitution which threatened her,
owing to some heavy reverses which had befallen them in their native
land.

I was outwardly very sympathetic as she recited these melancholy
details. She did not suspect, poor thing, what an effort I was obliged
to make to keep track of her subject at all, and I was conscious of
having won her kind favor under false pretences. Before she could
pursue her pet topic to any fuller advantage, however, the music began
again and our newly made friendship was effectually nipped in the bud.
During the next selection, which was a lengthy piano solo by the
fashionable Miss Nibbs, I busied myself observing all that transpired
about me. Miss Nibbs herself was worthy of some notice; perched upon
the piano-stool, her flat feet barely reaching the pedals, and her
ill-formed bulky figure swaying now on one side, now on another.
Whatever Miss Nibbs had been in her youth, and to speak truly one
might doubt at this period of her existence if she had ever known a
younger day, she certainly was very much worn and used looking in her
decline. Not even the faded remnants of an earlier grace or gentility
helped to redeem the weak points of nature about her. She was a
stranger to me, and yet I could have declared with the most perfect
sanction of my moral certitude that she was the direct descendant of a
plebeian stock. Not but that she had counterfeited patrician
attributes according to her own interpretation of them as earnestly as
she knew how; but such, empty pretensions as these are too transparent
to the all-discerning eye of true gentility. They can not easily
assume that which they have no right to claim. A haughty, overbearing
demeanor, or a powerful drawl, is no guarantee of good breeding, and
these were poor Miss Nibbs' only titles to it. I will admit that, in
my fretted mood, I saw her at her worst. Not a wrinkle of her
ill-fitting bodice escaped me, not a movement of her ungainly form
passed unnoticed, I was dissecting her to a pitiful disadvantage,
following up each new discovery with a moral of my own when a
half-subdued voice whispered in my ear:

"Spare her, Miss Hampden."

I looked up significantly and met Dr. Campbell's mock-reproachful
glance, resting full upon me.

"Spare whom?" I asked, very innocently.

"Oh! you wicked critic of human frailties," he answered slowly, "whom
do you think?"

I betrayed myself with an ill-suppressed smile which broadened into a
genuine laugh as poor Miss Nibbs retired most awkwardly from her post,
very well satisfied with herself, no doubt.

During the interval that followed, Dr. Campbell amused himself with
the indulgence of a new freak. He leaned his elbow on the back of the
chair in front of us, and turning his face towards me supported his
head in the palm of his hand. There was a new expression on his
countenance which foreboded the tantalising remark that followed:

"Do you know, Miss Hampden," he began, looking at me through his half
closed eye-lids, "you are beginning to puzzle me strangely. Did any
one ever tell you you are an eccentric girl?"

"Oh dear! yes! my step-mother persuaded me to that comfortable
conviction long ago," I answered laughingly.

He followed up this agreeable retort with a most expressive "Ahem!"
and then paused a moment before adding in a very emphatic tone:

"Well, you are a queer girl, you know."

"Because I fall short of your standard, I suppose?" I interrupted,
passing my hand languidly over my brow and eyes.

"Well that is not a bad guess, Miss Hampden, but that is not the only
reason."

The shaft pierced me. Arthur Campbell was not always in a mood to
flatter. I wanted to prove to him that two could play at his little
game and I hardly knew how to match him.

"I suppose I ought to feel quite grieved at this intelligence," I
answered consciously, "but, dear me," with an artificial sigh, "I
cannot bring myself to study people's opinions; that is probably one
feature of my eccentricity?" I added in an interrogative tone, looking
aimlessly at him.

He was silent for a moment during which he looked around the room.
Then he stood up saying:

"Let us go outside, I see the music is over."

I rose and took his proffered arm and we turned towards the door. As
we passed out my eyes fell upon Mr. Dalton's solitary figure standing
by the window opposite. A stern, set expression was upon his
countenance, and his glance was riveted upon us. I inclined my head
with a smile, but he either saw not or purposely took no notice of it,
for he went on staring abstractedly until we vanished into the
adjoining room.

For a second time in our lives Arthur Campbell and I were alone amidst
suggestive surroundings such as met us as we passed under the heavy
curtain that screened the cosiest of _boudoirs_ from the general view.

There is such a special appropriateness about certain circumstances
that one cannot help speculating to some extent upon their probable
and possible issues. It is a known fact that a vast percentage of
society marriages are the outgrowth of these little stolen
_tete-a-tetes_ that are snatched from the gay confusion of some noisy
gathering. No one will be so unreasonable as to denounce the young
heart that flutters with some timid anticipation, as it forsakes the
mad merry-making of the ball room for the quiet insinuating stillness
of some reserved nook by a flickering fireside, where the flower-laden
atmosphere whispers interesting suggestions of its own. Far be it from
me to overshadow such gleams of sunlight, by censure or cruel mockery,
and when I affirm most earnestly that such flutterings of vague
expectation never animated my poor heart, so cold, so empty, so
unbelieving, it is not that I hold it outside and above such an
influence. I only lay bare the barrenness of its nature and the
trustless reserve that always made the world around me seem wrapped in
a gloomy pall, that inspired me with suspicion, if not altogether fear
of it.

I will not take the responsibility of affirming that my views were at
all odd or singular, and incompatible with the real condition of
feminine hearts at that time. Neither would I like to assure the world
that our blooming society girls of to-day are any more credulous or
unwisely susceptible than many were at the date I speak of. It has
become a popular belief, I think, that beauty coupled with a
fascinating manner in a woman, is as heartless and unfeeling as a
stone, and yet is just indifferent and neutral enough to abstain from
inflicting any more direct pain than that to which its indiscreet
victims expose themselves knowingly. There is a certain pity excited
by human moths that flutter about our drawing-rooms with their smooth
velvety wings charred and disfigured, but even in the sympathy
expressed there is a ring of "I told you so," and "beware the next
time" that makes the sufferer's burden only heavier to endure.

I can not take upon me to say that Arthur Campbell's beautiful pinions
had touched the dangerous flame with any alarming results. I believed
him to be very human in spite of his multiplied efforts to establish
himself above or below that limit. I saw, when our acquaintanceship
was only an hour old, that he was an artful man and, to no small
extent, a conceited man. I did not suspect him of regulating his life
according to the dictates of a scrupulous conscience. In fact I
daresay I was uncharitable enough to look upon him as wanting that
blessed monitor, altogether. He professed no definite religious
belief, and generally held all creeds to be equally good. Sometimes
when he wanted to excite the particular interest of some orthodox
young lady he leaned towards the agnostics, and without upholding
their tenets, exactly, wanted to know why their right to establish
themselves should be so universally questioned and condemned. He liked
to see pretty faces looking shocked, and his ears revelled in the
sound of a plaintively persuading voice that argued on the side of old
truth; he would even allow himself to be converted for the moment by a
reproachful look from indignant blue eyes. It gave a flavour to a
languid flirtation and "after all," he was wont to say, "what religion
can be better than that whose ministers are fair and beautiful women."

He was an acknowledged flirt; a regular knave of Hearts; and yet
totally unlike those professional lady-killers who carry their smooth
chins so very high above their would-be rivals in fashionable
drawing-rooms. There was no insinuation of his purpose or design about
Arthur Campbell as he stepped quietly in among the many _coteries_ of
which he was a spoiled darling. His profession excused him for his
late arrivals everywhere, and, in the bargain, granted him ample
opportunity for intruding himself upon the notice of everyone present
without being condemned for presumption or conceit. It was whispered
of him that his private life was based upon free and easy principles,
and that he was not altogether so circumspect a walker in the ways of
righteousness as he was in the ways of society. Such an accusation,
however, remained perforce under an open verdict. Too many of those
who might have decided against him had delicate glass-houses of their
own to care for, and it would likely prove a treacherous missile that
would aim at the well-propped reputation of Doctor Campbell.

I had my own private opinion about him, which never prevented me from
openly admiring his tactics, from enjoying his company, and, in a
sense, from coveting his attentions. Strangely enough, I had every
opportunity for indulging all three. We were thrown frequently
together, and I could not help seeing that he took more than a passing
notice of me. To tell the truth, until a certain time I never
questioned the possible motive that might have inspired him to seek my
company. I met him always with a cordial, and may be a very cordial,
smile. He was an interesting man, who talked well, and as such
appealed largely to my ardent appreciation. We became friends in a
very little while, and probably contributed largely towards each
other's mutual enjoyment. But very soon the all-seeing eye of a
jealous scrutiny was upon us, and we were singled out wherever we
went. Little rumors were being hatched, destined before long to creep
out from under the great fostering wing of that old hen, Gossip, who
is ever chuckling over some new and active brood. People caught the
message and repeated it with a relish. People said that young Campbell
was no fool in aspiring to succeed to Dr. Hampden's practice. People
said: Trust the fellow to spy out a rich man's only daughter. People
said: The Hampdens have made a dead set on Campbell, always asking him
to luncheon, etc. People said: He is fooling her. In fact people gave
expression to every uncomplimentary sentiment which the circumstances
could possibly suggest, and it was only then that I turned my
attention to the matter at all. I heard the floating verdicts that
were being pronounced upon us, and thenceforth I also infused a
certain purpose into our hitherto aimless relationship. I quietly
resolved to meet that respectable body so widely known as the "people"
in open combat. I needed no formidable weapon, an old halter would
answer my purpose fully, for of course my readers know that this
loud-voiced authority, this much feared power, this braying denouncer
of men's private, social, or moral attitudes is only our friend the
ass in a pretty well-fitting lion-skin, not nearly so dangerous as
timid souls imagine, a nuisance certainly, but that is all.

When Arthur Campbell and I vacated the crowded drawing-room,
therefore, and passed into the quiet retreat opposite, many a
significant glance followed us besides poor Mr. Dalton's. I knew it
and so did he, although no mention was made of it by either of us. We
had drifted imperceptibly into that phase of a growing friendship
which is silent upon certain interesting topics. We often talked in a
vague and general way about the tender influences, but never now by
any chance allowed our random remarks to convey any personal
reflections. We were puzzling over one another, which is a fatal
resource for unfortified hearts, but we prided ourselves upon our
well-guarded and invulnerable affections, and, in a way, playfully
defied the inevitable to conquer us.

Arthur Campbell held the heavy drapery aside until I had glided into
the room. He then drew it briskly across the doorway and followed me
to an ebony cabinet before which I had stood to look at a comical
crockery pug that lay on one of its tiny shelves. He glanced over my
shoulder at my interesting distraction, and was silent for a moment. I
could feel his breath upon my hair and ear, then he said slowly:

"You seem to be fond of animals, which is your favorite?"

An answer rushed to my lips and I was conscious of a mischievous
expression creeping over my face. Had I reflected for a moment I might
never have uttered it, but before I had time to weigh my words, they
had been pointedly pronounced.

"Man--of course," I said; "Which is yours?"

He did not answer as quickly as I had, and yet I did not dare look at
him or speak again. After a moment's pause, however, I ventured to
raise my eyes towards the cabinet, and as I did so, how my heart
thumped, how my cheeks reddened. He had stretched one hand out to
reach some object that stood on one of the ebony brackets above me,
and the reflection in the little square mirror before us was, to say
the least, rather suggestive. The bracket being higher than the mirror
was not visible in it. The effect produced therefore was that of a
broadcloth sleeve, carefully brought around two slender shoulders, and
a handsome manly countenance leaning a little towards a blushing
maiden's face. Worse than all, he too happened to look into the glass
at the same moment, and our eyes in shrinking from one another's
glance met under an awkward circumstance. He looked steadily at Amey
Hampden in mirrorland, and then said in a very conventional tone,
turning his eyes towards the bracket:

"Pardon me, I want to show you something."

It was a beautiful white dove which, though lifeless, had retained
much of its grace and softness. In its beak was a dainty little card
upon which was inscribed in large characters: "Love one another."

"Do you like it?" he asked after we had examined it silently for a
moment.

"The idea is certainly original," I answered evasively.

"Yes, but do you like it?" he repeated

"Which?" I asked, "the bird, or the idea altogether?"

"The idea altogether."

"Oh! ye-e-s," I drawled as indifferently as I possibly could. "It is a
very chaste conception on the whole--but--"

"But what?"

"Oh! there is not much in it after all."

"Miss Hampden! you astonish me! Not much in loving one another,
especially with such an exalted, enduring love as that which the dove
symbolises."

"You mistake me, Dr Campbell," I interrupted suddenly, looking up at
him, but I did not finish, for some one just vanished out of the
doorway as I turned my head. The curtain was still swaying when I
stopped my remark abruptly, and Arthur Campbell following my glance,
strode towards the entrance and looked indignantly out. The passage
was clear, and he returned, laughing, saying the eavesdropper was no
one more formidable than the draught. I was not so easily convinced,
however, and asked to go back in to the drawing-room where the
merriment was still unabating. He did not seem quite pleased, but
nevertheless offered me his arm unhesitatingly, and we passed in among
the noisy crowd just in time for the summons to supper.




CHAPTER VII.


When I awoke the morning after the Merivales' Musical, the forenoon
was already pretty well advanced and a light, warm fire was burning in
my room. Outside, the winter wind was shrieking plaintively, and over
every pane of the window were dense layers of frosty ferns and
grasses. It wanted a few minutes for the half hour after ten by the
prattling little time-piece on the mantel. I arose and dressed
languidly, feeling dull and oppressed and rang for a cup of strong
coffee. I felt no appetite for breakfast, and drawing my warm, heavy
wrapper around me I wheeled a low easy chair toward the fire and sank
wearily into it.

It may be a wise policy for the votaries of gaslight pleasures to
maintain that there is no baneful result arising from a constant
pursuit of such distractions, but, however wise this attitude may be,
I hardly think it can rely upon the sanction of our conscience. It is
certainly not sound truth. For the abnormal life which society
prescribes for her followers is fruitful of most injurious
consequences. Evil effects do not always thrust themselves upon our
notice in any directly pronounced way. Very often those which are most
pernicious have a stealthy and unobtrusive progress, and it is only
when their destructive mission is well accomplished that we become
aware of their existence. There are physical, moral, and mental
wrecks, the playthings of every varying circumstance that agitates the
sea of life, who are living examples of the truth I uphold: men and
women who have made an oblation of their greatest energies and
capacities to lay upon the altars of a profitless materialism. This is
of course the extreme limit of worldliness, but in many cases it had a
tame and semi-respectable beginning, originating from circumstances as
seemingly safe as those which make up our own individual lives. Who
can tell whether danger will allow us to tempt and tease her with
impunity. The fortifications around our personal lots are not so
stable as we imagine, and they require our constant and vigilant
supervision. While we are feasting and rioting the scouts of the enemy
are conspiring strongly against us.

For myself I say, that every indulgence of this kind invariably brings
me an uncomfortable re-action, and I have never been able to satisfy
myself with the explanation which is popularly received regarding it.
It is not merely the result of physical disorder, of that I am sure.
There is not a morbid tendency, ever so latent within me, that is not
brought forcibly to the surface during this re-action, and I never
realize so fully that the pleasures of the senses are empty and
fleeting as when I have given myself up to an unbridled indulgence of
any of them. I have rested my eyes upon every conceivable form and
phase of animate and inanimate beauty in my life-time, and to-day my
poor eyes are tired and dissatisfied. My ear, that has been inclined
to every sort of sweet and sad melody, is still waiting and hoping for
a soul-stirring refrain that will never reach it; and my heart, that
has quickened at glad surprises and fluttered during hours of the
world's happiness, is still asking, still searching for a joy that
will minister in full to its demands. No wonder then that so many of
us pause in the midst of our gay confusion, and ask ourselves wearily:
"What is the use?"

What is the use of all these vain efforts of ours to feed our inner
appetites with a diet that can never nourish or sustain? What is the
use of all these monotonous beginnings that never have any tangible
end? What is the use of playing so burdensome a part upon the social
stage? What is the use of deceiving ourselves and our fellow-men, when
there is such a glorious cause of truth to fight for? Ah! it is the
way of the world, and that is a power which we fear to defy. The way
of the world! These little words have justified sin and crime over and
over again. They have masked the vilest cunning with a surface of
unquestionable propriety; they have quietly sanctioned one fashionable
folly after another, until vice and virtue are brought to one level,
ay, and if needs be, the former triumphs, and the latter is shoved
aside to make headway for its counterfeit. It is the way of the world
that poverty be sneered at and denounced, that humility be ridiculed,
that modesty be mocked, not openly not daringly, but by covert and
cutting insinuation, the ever are weapon of the moral coward. It is
the way of the world that sorrow be held pent up in hearts that are
dying for care and sympathy, the way of the world that selfish motives
be the best, that might is right, and indeed who can say our dazzling,
splendid, cruel world has not its way? And we, its victims, its
votaries, what recompense have we?

Such reflections as these trooped in solemn order before my mental
vision as I sat staring into the coals, that frosty morning after the
Merivales' entertainment. Every circumstance of the preceding night
rehearsed itself in my memory. I repeated Arthur Campbell's every
word. I had not forgotten one. I recalled Mr. Dalton's steady look,
even Miss Nibbs' funny little personality rode upon the embers, and
brought a faint smile to my pensive countenance. I teazed myself with
interrogative conjectures of every kind, now leaning towards one, and
now towards another. Somehow the vagaries of our hope or of our fancy,
like ourselves, look their best by gas-light, and show a very
disappointing complexion in the open daylight. While I sat thus
weaving and tangling the webs of my aimless thought, the door opened
and my step-mother glided in with a dainty little note between her
fingers.

"Lazy girl," she muttered in a half yawn, throwing the note into my
lap. "Rouse yourself, and read this. An answer is wanted."

It was from Alice Merivale, to my surprise, and appeared to have been
scratched off in a hurry:

"If you have nothing on hand for the afternoon, dear Amey, I wish you
would come over at about one o'clock and take luncheon with me. It is
so stupid. A. M."

I folded it up and smiled, as I went in search of my writing
materials.

In half an hour after I was waiting to be admitted into their house. I
was shown into Alice's apartment according to her direction. She was
lying on a lounge by the fire, with her delicate hands clasped over
her shapely head. Her long, yellow hair fell in soft braids on each
slender shoulder. She wore a _negligee_ of white, with delicate
trimmings of swan's down and looked, on the whole, the living
impersonation of luxury and beauty. When I was shown in she greeted me
with a languid smile, but did not alter her comfortable position.

"I am so glad you've come, Amey," she said looking up at me where I
stood beside her. "Just throw your becoming wearables anywhere there
and come and sit down for a chat."

I did as she told me, and a moment later we were both settled
luxuriously before the glowing embers ready for mutual entertainment.

"Did you think I was crazy, Amey, when you received my note this
morning?" Alice asked, drawing the vagrant folds of her soft wrapper
about her.

"Well, no, Alice," I answered slowly, "but I found it a little queer,
that was all."

"Queer world, is'nt it Amey?"

I smiled, and still looking into the fire said, as if in soliloquy.

"How much alike we girls are. I came to that very conclusion an hour
ago before my own embers."

"What reason have _you_ to think that?" she said, with a wondering
look in her beautiful blue eyes.

"Every reason in the world."

"And I have so often envied you, Amey Hampden, and thought you a
fortunate and happy girl beside a wretch like me."

"Alice!" I broke in, in consternation "how can you talk like this?
You, the spoilt darling of Fortune herself, you, the cynosure of so
many eyes, the possessor of untold worldly comfort and happiness."

"Go on, go on, I like that," she interrupted ironically.

"Well, you know you are," I added emphatically.

"A wretch! yes, without a doubt" she answered firmly. "I am rich in
that which can buy everything but peace of mind and contentment of
heart. I am fortunate enough to escape that experience which gives a
flavor and a charm to existence. I am the cynosure of eyes that are
content with surface glitter only, and the possessor of comforts and
happiness that have made my life the empty, blighted thing it is."

She paused while the sound of her altered voice vibrated in the room,
then laughed a merry, artful little laugh and rising languidly to her
feet, added:

"Oh, dear! oh dear! what funny people we are!"

Before any more was said upon this tender subject we went down to
lunch, laughing and chatting as gaily as though we were the
freest-hearted creatures in existence.

We spent an hour in discussing the good things below, and then went
back arm-in-arm to the cosy apartments we had vacated above. The fire
had been renewed and our seats still in the same suggestive places
attracted us towards them again. Alice threw herself upon her lounge
and hummed a snatch of her last night's selection, which she suddenly
interrupted with a fully-indulged yawn out of which again emerged a
taunting

"Come now Amelia, _a quoi penses-tu_?"

"I was thinking of you," I answered, "you are such a queer girl."

"You will be still further convinced of that opinion when you know a
little more about me," she said in a jocosely earnest tone. "You know

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