ble, and she longed for
excitement. The passion for praise and admiration had become to
her like the passion of the opium-eater for his drug, or of the
brandy-drinker for his dram. But now she was heedlessly steering to
what might prove a more palpable sin.

Harry the serf, once half despised for his slavish devotion, now stood
before her, proud and free, and tantalized her by the display he made
of his indifference, and preference for others. She put forth every
art and effort to recapture him. But the most dreadful stroke of fate
of all was, that Rose Ferguson had come to New York to make a winter
visit, and was much talked of in certain circles where Harry was quite
intimate; and he professed himself, indeed, an ardent admirer at her
shrine.

CHAPTER XX.

_THE VAN ASTRACHANS_.

The Van Astrachans, a proud, rich old family, who took a certain
defined position in New-York life on account of some ancestral
passages in their family history, had invited Rose to spend a month or
two with them; and she was therefore moving as a star in a very high
orbit.

Now, these Van Astrachans were one of those cold, glittering,
inaccessible pinnacles in Mrs. Follingsbee's fashionable Alp-climbing
which she would spare no expense to reach if possible. It was one of
the families for whose sake she had Mrs. John Seymour under her roof;
and the advent of Rose, whom she was pleased to style one of Mrs.
Seymour's most intimate friends, was an unhoped-for stroke of good
luck; because there was the necessity of calling on Rose, of taking
her out to drive in the park, and of making a party on her account,
from which, of course, the Van Astrachans could not stay away.

It will be seen here that our friend, Mrs. Follingsbee, like all
ladies whose watch-word is "Excelsior," had a peculiar, difficult, and
slippery path to climb.

The Van Astrachans were good old Dutch-Reformed Christians,
unquestioning believers in the Bible in general, and the Ten
Commandments in particular,--persons whose moral constitutions had
been nourished on the great stocky beefsteaks and sirloins of plain
old truths which go to form English and Dutch nature. Theirs was
a style of character which rendered them utterly hopeless of
comprehending the etherealized species of holiness which obtained
in the innermost circles of the Follingsbee _illuminati_. Mr. Van
Astrachan buttoned under his coat not only many solid inches of what
Carlyle calls "good Christia