, because of that. This he said to me the very last day of his
life. Ah! I trust the dead do not know the troubles that come to the
living. It would have troubled my father--nay, it would have been
anguish to him, even in heaven itself, if he could have seen my life
after he was gone. It is no use talking or thinking about it. After two
wretched years I was only too glad to be married, and get away from the
woman who owed almost the duty of a mother to me.

Richard Foster was a nephew of my step-mother, the only man I was
allowed to see. He was almost twice my age; but he had pleasant manners,
and a smooth, smooth tongue. I believed he loved me, he swore it so
often and so earnestly; and I was in sore need of love. I wanted some
one to take care of me, and think of me, and comfort me, as my father
had been used to do. So much alone, so desolate I had been since his
death, no one caring whether I were happy or miserable, ill or well,
that I felt grateful to Richard Foster when he said he loved me. He
seemed to come in my father's stead, and my step-mother urged and
hurried on our marriage, and I did not know what I was doing. The
trustees who had charge of my property left me to the care of my
father's widow. That was how I came to marry him when I was only a girl
of seventeen, with no knowledge of the world but what I had learned on
my father's sheep-run.

It was a horrible, shameful thing, if you will only think of it. There
was I, an ignorant, unconscious, bewildered girl, with the film of
childhood over my eyes still; and there was he, a crafty, unprincipled,
double-tongued adventurer, who was in love with my fortune, not with me.
As quickly as he could carry me off from my home, and return to his own
haunts in Europe, he brought me away from the colony, where all whom I
could ever call friends were living. I was utterly alone with him--at
his mercy. There was not an ear that I could whisper a complaint to; not
one face that would look at me in pity and compassion. My father had
been a good man, single-hearted, high-minded, and chivalrous. This man
laughed at all honor and conscience scornfully.

I cannot tell you the shock and horror of it. I had not known there were
such places and such people in the world, until I was thrust suddenly
into the midst of them; innocent at first, like the child I was, but the
film soon passed away from my eyes. I grew to loathe myself as well as
him. How would an angel feel, who was