forced to go down to hell, and
become like the lost creatures there, remembering all the time the
undefiled heaven he was banished from? I was no angel, but I had been a
simple, unsullied, clear-minded girl, and I found myself linked in
association with men and women such as frequent the gambling-places on
the Continent. For we lived upon the Continent, going from one
gambling-place to another. How was a girl like me to possess her own
soul, and keep it pure, when it belonged to a man like Richard Foster?

There was one more injury and degradation for me to suffer. I recollect
the first moment I saw the woman who wrought me so much misery
afterward. We were staying in Homburg for a few weeks at a hotel; and
she was seated at a little table in a window, not far from the one where
we were sitting. A handsome, bold-looking, arrogant woman. They had
known one another years before, it seemed. He said she was his cousin.
He left me to go and speak to her, and I watched them, though I did not
know then that any thing more would come of it than a casual
acquaintance. I saw his face grow animated, and his eyes look into hers,
with an expression that stirred something like jealousy within me, if
jealousy can exist without love. When he returned to me, he told me he
had invited her to join us as my companion. She came to us that evening.

She never left us after that. I was too young, he said, to be left alone
in foreign towns while he was attending to his business, and his cousin
would be the most suitable person to take care of me. I hated the woman
instinctively. She was civil to me just at first, but soon there was
open war between us, at which he laughed only; finding amusement for
himself in my fruitless efforts to get rid of her. After a while I
discovered it could only be by setting myself free from him.

Now judge me. Tell me what I was bound to do. Three voices I hear speak.

One says: "You, a poor hasty girl, very weak yet innocent, ought to have
remained in the slough, losing day by day your purity, your worth, your
nobleness, till you grew like your companions. You had vowed ignorantly,
with a profound ignorance it might be, to obey and honor this man till
death parted you. You had no right to break that vow."

Another says: "You should have made of yourself a spy, you should have
laid traps; you should have gathered up every scrap of evidence you
could find against them, that might have freed you in a court of la