shot a racy sparkle through it; convent-care from her
tenth to her sixteenth year had softened and toned the whole into a
warm, generous life; and underneath all there slumbered that one atom of
integral individuality that was nothing at all but a spark: as yet, its
fire had never flashed; if it ever should do so, one might be safe in
prophesying a strange wayward blaze.

In one of her earliest summers her widowed mother had died and
bequeathed her sole legacy, a penniless orphan, to the care of the
survivor in an imperishable friendship, Disbrowe Erne. A childless,
thriftless, melancholy man, Mr. Erne had adopted her into his inmost
heart, but out of respect to his friend had suffered her to retain her
father's name, and had thoughtlessly delayed rendering the adoption
legal. One day it was found too late to remedy this delay; for Mr. Erne
died, just a year after Eloise's return from the distant Northern
convent whither at ten years old she had been despatched, when, wild and
witching as a wood-brier, there had been found nothing else to do with
her. There her adopted father had visited her twice a year in all her
exile, as she deemed it, sometimes taking up his residence for several
months in the neighborhood of the nunnery; and a long vacation of many
weeks she had every winter spent at home with him on the rich and
beautiful plantation poetically known as The Rim, because, seen from
several of the adjacent places, it occupied the whole southern horizon.
The last vacation, however, she had passed with her adopted father
travelling in France, whither some affairs called him; but, of all the
splendid monuments and records of civilization that she saw, almost the
only thing that had impressed itself distinctly upon her memory, through
the chicanery of chances, was that once in a cathedral-choir she had
seen the handsome, blonde-hued, Vandyck face of a gentleman with
dreaming eyes looking at her from a gallery-niche with the most singular
earnestness. So at sixteen she found that the nuns had exhausted their
slender lore, and had nothing more to teach her; and after her brief
travels, she returned home for a finality, and there had dallied a
twelvemonth, lapped in the Elysium of freedom and youth. Every want
anticipated, every whim gratified, servants prostrate before her, father
adoring her,--the year sped on wings of silent joy, and left her a shade
more imperious than it met her. Launched into society, wealthy and
wi