attained, but which, in the long struggle after wealth, had escaped
the honest couple that befriended her, became by degrees her own,
tempering without destroying her individuality, any more than the new
life of restraint that now governed her physical powers, was able to
weaken or subdue that rare and splendid physique which had been her
fairest birthright.

In the lap of luxury, therefore, and in full possession of means to come
and go and conform herself to the genteel world and its fashions, she
passed the next four years; but scarcely had she attained the age of
fifteen, when bankruptcy, followed by death, again robbed her of her
home and set her once more adrift upon the world.

This time she looked to no one for assistance. Refusing all offers, many
of them those of honorable marriage, she sought for work, and after a
short delay found it in the household of Mr. Orcutt. The aged sister who
governed his home and attended to all its domestic details, hired her as
a sort of assistant, rightly judging that the able young body and the
alert hand would bring into the household economy just that life and
interest which her own failing strength had now for some time refused
to supply.

That the girl was a beauty and something more, who could not from the
nature of things be kept in that subordinate position, she either failed
to see, or, seeing, was pleased to disregard. She never sought to impose
restraint upon the girl any more than she did upon her brother, when in
the course of events she saw that his eye was at last attracted and his
imagination fired by the noble specimen of girlhood that made its daily
appearance at his own board.

That she had introduced a dangerous element into that quiet home, that
ere long would devastate its sacred precincts, and endanger, if not
destroy, its safety and honor, she had no reason to suspect. What was
there in youth, beauty, and womanly power that one should shrink from
their embodiment and tremble as if an evil instead of a good had entered
that hitherto undisturbed household? Nothing, if they had been all. But
alas for her, and alas for him--they were not all! Mixed with the youth,
beauty, and power was a something else not to be so readily
understood--a something, too, which, without offering explanation to the
fascinated mind that studied her, made the beauty unique, the youth a
charm, and the power a controlling force. She was not to be sounded.
Going and coming, smili