ds and does not know what to do with it.

An opportunity being thus given for Mrs. Belden's story, she at once
composed herself to the task, with the following result.

XXXII MRS. BELDEN'S NARRATIVE

"Cursed, destructive Avarice,
Thou everlasting foe to Love and Honor."
--Trap's Atram.

"Mischief never thrives
Without the help of Woman."
--The Same.

IT will be a year next July since I first saw Mary Leavenworth. J
was living at that time a most monotonous existence. Loving what was
beautiful, hating what was sordid, drawn by nature towards all that
was romantic and uncommon, but doomed by my straitened position and the
loneliness of my widowhood to spend my days in the weary round of plain
sewing, I had begun to think that the shadow of a humdrum old age
was settling down upon me, when one morning, in the full tide of my
dissatisfaction, Mary Leavenworth stepped across the threshold of my
door and, with one smile, changed the whole tenor of my life.

This may seem exaggeration to you, especially when I say that her errand
was simply one of business, she having heard I was handy with my needle;
but if you could have seen her as she appeared that day, marked the look
with which she approached me, and the smile with which she left, you
would pardon the folly of a romantic old woman, who beheld a fairy queen
in this lovely young lady. The fact is, I was dazzled by her beauty and
her charms. And when, a few days after, she came again, and crouching
down on the stool at my feet, said she was so tired of the gossip and
tumult down at the hotel, that it was a relief to run away and hide with
some one who would let her act like the child she was, I experienced
for the moment, I believe, the truest happiness of my life. Meeting her
advances with all the warmth her manner invited, I found her ere long
listening eagerly while I told her, almost without my own volition, the
story of my past life, in the form of an amusing allegory.

The next day saw her in the same place; and the next; always with the
eager, laughing eyes, and the fluttering, uneasy hands, that grasped
everything they touched, and broke everything they grasped.

But the fourth day she was not there, nor the fifth, nor the sixth, and
I was beginning to feel the old shadow settling back upon me, when one
night, just as the dusk of twilight was merging into evening gloom, she
came stealing in at the front door, and, cr