a young woman whose grace and charm had such an effect upon
him that he relinquished all thought of the Providence lady, though it
was some time before he could face the prospect of marrying the one
who had so greatly interested him; as she was not only in humble
circumstances, but was encumbered with a child concerning whose
parentage the neighbors professed ignorance, and she had nothing to
say. But, as is very apt to be the case in an affair like this, love and
admiration soon got the better of worldly wisdom. Taking his future
in his hands, he offered himself as her husband, when she immediately
proved herself worthy of his regard by entering at once into those
explanations he was too much of a gentleman to demand. The story she
told was pitiful. She proved to be an American by birth, her father
having been a well-known merchant of Chicago. While he lived, her home
was one of luxury, but just as she was emerging into womanhood he died.
It was at his funeral she met the man destined to be her ruin. How he
came there she never knew; he was not a friend of her father's. It
is enough he was there, and saw her, and that in three weeks--don't
shudder, she was such a child--they were married. In twenty-four hours
she knew what that word meant for her; it meant blows. Everett, I am
telling no fanciful story. In twenty-four hours after that girl was
married, her husband, coming drunk into the house, found her in his way,
and knocked her down. It was but the beginning. Her father's estate, on
being settled up, proving to be less than expected, he carried her off
to England, where he did not wait to be drunk in order to maltreat her.
She was not free from his cruelty night or day. Before she was sixteen,
she had run the whole gamut of human suffering; and that, not at the
hands of a coarse, common ruffian, but from an elegant, handsome,
luxury-loving gentleman, whose taste in dress was so nice he would
sooner fling a garment of hers into the fire than see her go into
company clad in a manner he did not consider becoming. She bore it till
her child was born, then she fled. Two days after the little one saw the
light, she rose from her bed and, taking her baby in her arms, ran out
of the house. The few jewels she had put into her pocket supported her
till she could set up a little shop. As for her husband, she neither saw
him, nor heard from him, from the day she left him till about two weeks
before Horatio Leavenworth first met