but not of them,--proud, reticent,
ambitious, secretly hating the monotonous duties and pursuits, the
decorous forms and prescribed pleasures of the social and domestic life
around her. Nomadic and lawless instincts stirred in her blood; vague
longings for freedom and change, though in wandering, peril, and want,
sometimes filled her soul with the spirit of revolt and unrest.

In her bluff uncle's house all were kind, and one, at least, was fond.
Her Cousin Bessie, gay and tender heart, had found the southern exposure
of her nature, and had crept up it, and clambered over it, and clasped
it, and bloomed against it, and ripened on it, till nothing cold, hard,
or defiant could be seen on that side. And Zelma seemed well content to
be the sombre background and strong support of so much bloom, sweetness,
and graceful dependence.

Nothing could be more unlike than the two cousins. Bessie was small,
her form inclining to fulness, her face childlike in dimpled smiles and
innocent blushes,--betraying no lack of intellect, but most expressive
of a quiet, almost indolent amiability. Zelma was large, but lithe,
supple, and vigorous, with a pard-like freedom and elasticity of
movement,--dark, with a subdued and changing color,--the fluttering
signal of sudden emotion, not the stationary sign of robust health. She
had hair of a glistening blackness, which she wore turned back from a
strong, compact forehead, in the somewhat severe style which imperial
beauty has rendered classic in our time. Her eyes were of the Oriental
type,--full, heavy-lidded, ambushed in thick, black lashes,--themselves
dark and unfathomable as the long night of mystery which hangs over the
history of her wild and wandering race, those unsubduable, unseducible
children of Nature,--the voluntary Pariahs of the world. Sad were those
eyes always, but with a vague, uncommunicable sadness; soft they were in
times of quiet; beautiful and terrible they could be, with live gleams
of suddenly awakened passion.

With but one affection not poisoned by a sense of obligation and
condescension, and that a sentiment in which her intellect had little
share, a gentle, protective, household love, which quickened no daring
fancy, inspired no dream of freedom or power, Zelma's mind was driven
in upon itself, and out of the seclusion and triteness of her life
fashioned a fairy world of romance and beauty. With the high-wrought,
sentimental fictions of the day for her mental alime