confiding in his nature,
had been turned as by a lightning's stroke, to all that was hard, bitter
and suspicious. He would not allow the name of Jacqueline to be spoken
in his presence; he would listen to no allusion made to those days when
she was the care and perplexity, but also the light and pleasure of the
house. Men are not like women, my child; when they turn, it is at an
angle, the whole direction of their nature changes.

"Perhaps the news that presently came to us from Boston may have had
something to do with this. It was surely dreadful enough; Jacqueline's
perfidy had slain her lover. Mr. Robert Holt, the cultured, noble,
high-souled gentleman, had been found lying dead on the floor of his
room, a few days after the events I have just related, with a lady's
diamond ring in his hand and the remnants of a hastily burned letter in
the grate before him. He had burst a blood-vessel, and had expired
instantly.

"This sudden and tragic ending of a man of energy and will, was also the
reason, perhaps, why Grotewell never arrived at the truth of
Jacqueline's history. Boston was a long way from here in those days, and
the story of her lover's death was not generally known, while the fact
of her elopement was. Consequently she was supposed to have fled with
the man who had been seen to visit her most frequently; a report which
neither the Colonel nor myself had the courage to deny.

"My child, you have a brow like snow, and a cheek like roses; you know
little of life's sorrows and little of life's sins. To you the skies are
blue, the woods vernal, the air balmy; the sad looks upon men's and
women's faces, tell but shallow tales of the ceaseless grinding of grief
in their pent up souls. But you are gentle, and you have an imagination
that goes beyond your experience; perhaps if you pause and think, you
can understand what a tale could be told of the weeks and months and
years that now followed, without hint or whisper of the fate of her who
had gone out from amongst us with the brand of her father's curse upon
her brow. At first we hoped, yes, _he_ hoped,--I could see it in his
eyes when there came a sudden ring at the bell,--that some sign of her
penitence, or some proof of her existence, would come to relieve the
torture of our fears, if not the shame of our memories. But the door
that closed upon her on that fatal eve, had shut without an echo. While
we vainly waited, time had ample leisure to carve the furrows of