from childhood been the victim of rheumatism that
frequently rendered her entirely helpless. To these two and their
fashionable friends, he abandoned his elegant home, costly equipages,
and opera-box, reserving only a suite of rooms, his handsome
riding-horse, and yacht.

Grave and unostentatious, yet not moody,--neither impulsively liberal
and generous nor habitually penurious and uncharitable,--he led a
quiet and monotonously easy life, varied by occasional trips to
foreign lands, and comforted by the assurance that his income-tax was
one of the heaviest in the state. Two years after the death of his
mother, he took his sister a second time to Europe, hoping that the
climate of the Levant might relieve her suffering; and upon the
steamer in which he crossed the Atlantic he met Salome Owen.

Extravagantly fond of music, though unable to extract it from any
instrument, his attention had first been attracted by her exquisite
voice, which invested the voyage with a novel charm and rendered her a
great favorite with the passengers.

Human nature is wofully inflexible and obstinate, and not all the
Menus, Zoroasters, Solomons, and Platos have taught it wisdom;
wherefore it is not surprising that a caustic wit and savage cynic
asserts, "The vices, it may be said, await us in the journey of life
like hosts with whom we must successively lodge; and I doubt whether
experience would make us avoid them if we were to travel the same road
a second time."

Habit may be second nature, but it is the Gurth, the thrall of the
first,--the vassal of inherent impulses; and even the most ossified
natures contain some soft palpitating spot that will throb against
the hand that is sufficiently dexterous to find it. In every man and
woman there lurks a vein of sentiment, which, no matter how heavily
crushed by the super-incumbent mass of utilitarian, practical
commonplaceisms, will one day trickle through the dusty _debris_,
and creep like a silver thread over the dun waste of selfishness; or,
Arethusa-like, burst forth suddenly after long subterranean
wandering.

For forty years it had crawled silently and sluggishly under the
indurated and coldly egoistic nature of Merton Minge,--had been dammed
up at times by avarice and at others by grim recollections of his
domestic infelicity; but finally, after tedious meandering in the
Desert of Heartlessness, it struggled triumphantly to the surface one
glorious autumn night, when a golden moon