r husband. There is many a woman,
otherwise courageous enough, who will rather endure the worst and most
degrading, than encounter articulate insult. The mere lack of
conscience gives the scoundrel advantage incalculable over the honest
man; the lack of refinement gives a similar advantage to the cad over
the gentleman; the combination of the two lacks elevates the husband
and father into an autocrat. Hesper was not one her world would have
counted weak; she had physical courage enough; she rode well, and
without fear; she sat calm in the dentist's chair; she would have
fought with knife and pistol against violence to the death; and yet,
rather than encounter the brutality of an evil-begotten race
concentrated in her father, she would yield herself to a defilement
eternally more defiling than that she would both kill and die to escape.

"Give me a few hours first, mamma," she begged. "Don't let him come to
me just yet. For all your hardness, you feel a little for me--don't
you?"

"Duty is always hard, my child," said Lady Margaret. She entirely
believed it, and looked on herself as a martyr, a pattern of
self-devotion and womanly virtue. But, had she been certain of escaping
discovery, she would have slipped the koh-i-noor into her belt-pouch,
notwithstanding. Never once in her life had she done or abstained from
doing a thing _because_ that thing was right or was wrong. Such a
person, be she as old and as hard as the hills, is mere putty in the
fingers of Beelzebub.

Hesper rose and went to her own room. There, for a long hour, she
sat--with the skin of her fair face drawn tight over muscles rigid as
marble--sat without moving, almost without thinking--in a mere hell of
disgusted anticipation. She neither stormed nor wept; her life went
smoldering on; she nerved herself to a brave endurance, instead of a
far braver resistance.

I fancy Hesper would have been a little shocked if one had called her
an atheist. She went to church most Sundays--when in the country; for,
in the opinion of Lady Margaret, it was not decorous _there_ to omit
the ceremony: where you have influence you ought to set a good
example--of hypocrisy, namely! But, if any one had suggested to Hesper
a certain old-fashioned use of her chamber-door, she would have
inwardly laughed at the absurdity. But, then, you see, her chamber was
no closet, but a large and stately room; and, besides, how, alas!
_could_ the child of Roger and Lady M. Alice Mortime