re of my errand to East ---- Street?"

"I thought it possible that you were engaged in some charitable
mission; at least I hoped so."

"Charitable! Then you considered the feigned sickness a 'pious
fraud,' and did not condemn me? If charity carried me there, it was
solely charity to my suffering starving heart, which cried out for
its idol. You have heard of Dirce and Damiens dragged by wild
beasts? Theirs was a mere afternoon airing in comparison with the
race I am driven by the lash of your guardian, the spur of mamma, and
the frantic wails of my famished heart. I wish I could speak without
bitterness, and mockery, and exaggeration, but it has grown to be a
part of my nature, as features habituated to a mask insensibly assume
to some extent its outlines. I will try to put aside my flippant
hollow attempts at persiflage, which constitute my worldly mannerism,
and tell you in a few simple words. When I was about your age, I
think my nature must have resembled yours, for many of your ideas and
views of duty in this life remind me in a mournfully vague, tender
way of my own early youth; and from that far distant time taunting
reminiscences float down to me, whispers from my old self long, long
dead. When I was seventeen, I went one June to spend some weeks with
my Grandmother Neville, who was an invalid, and resided on the
Hudson, near a very picturesque spot, which artists were in the habit
of frequenting with their sketch-books. Allowed a degree of liberty
which mamma never accorded me at home, I availed myself of the lax
regimen of my grandmother, and roamed at will about the beautiful
country adjacent. In one of these ill-fated excursions I encountered
a young artist, who was spending a few days in the neighbourhood. I
was a simple-hearted schoolgirl, untutored in worldly wisdom, and had
always spent my vacations with grandmother, who was afflicted with no
aristocratic whims and vagaries; who thought it not wholly
unpardonable to be poor, and was so old-fashioned as to judge people
from their merits, not by the amount of their income tax.

"Belmont Eggleston was then about twenty-five, very handsome, very
talented, full of chivalric enthusiasm, and as refined and tender in
sensibility as a woman. We met accidentally at a farmhouse, where a
sudden shower drove us for shelter, and from that hour neither could
forget the other. It was the old, old immemorial story--two fresh
young souls united, two hearts exchanged, t