ho was distasteful to her at all
points, and she was told that that man was to have her daughter! He was
thoroughly distasteful He had been a spendthrift and a gambler;--then a
seeker after gold in wild, godless countries, and, to her thinking, not
at all the better because he had been a successful seeker. She believed
the man to be an atheist. She was told that his father was an infidel,
and was ready to believe the worst of the son. And yet in this terrible
emergency she was powerless. The girl was allowed to see the man, and
declared almost at once that she would transfer herself from her
mother's keeping to the keeping of this wicked one! She was transferred,
and the mother had been left alone.

Then came the blow,--very quickly, the blow which, as she now told
herself morning, noon, and night, was no worse than she had expected.
Another woman claimed the man as her husband, and so claimed him that
the world all around her had declared that the claim would be made good.
And the man himself had owned enough to make him unfit,--as she
thought,--to have the custody of any honest woman. Then she acknowledged
to herself the full weight of the misfortune that had fallen upon
them,--the misfortune which never would have fallen upon them had they
listened to her counsel,--and she had immediately put her shoulders to
the wheel with the object of rescuing her child from the perils, from
the sin, from the degradation of her position. And could she have
rescued her, could she have induced her daughter to remain at Puritan
Grange, there would even then have been consolation. It was one of the
tenets of her life,--the strongest, perhaps, of all those doctrines on
which she built her faith,--that this world is a world of woe; that
wailing and suffering, if not gnashing of teeth, is and should be the
condition of mankind preparatory to eternal bliss. For eternal bliss
there could, she thought, be no other preparation She did not want to be
happy here, or to have those happy around her whom she loved. She had
stumbled and gone astray,--she told herself hourly now that she had
stumbled and gone astray,--in preparing those roses and ribbons, and
other lightnesses for her young girl. It should have been all sackcloth
and ashes. Had it been all sackcloth and ashes there would not have been
this terrible fall. But if the loved one would now come back to
sackcloth and ashes,--if she would assent to the blackness of religious
asceticism, t