fice at the altar of Mammon." She married Mr. Sanford when
she was eighteen and he thirty-eight, and she married him because the
family necessities were such that she could not help herself. Marion was
their first child, the darling of a young mother's heart, and later, the
pride of a fond father's. Yet, before that daughter was eighteen she was
called upon to welcome in the place of her idolized mother--who had died
after some years of patient suffering--the children's governess. It
marred all joys of graduation, so far as Miss Sanford was concerned. She
had gone home in obedience to her conviction of filial duty, and had
striven to make her little sister and her brother believe that the new
mamma was all that she should be. She had been conscientiously earnest
in her effort to like in her new role the ex-governess, whom she had
found it impossible to believe in before. The effort was a failure, due
quite as much to the jealous and suspicious nature of the lady of the
house as to Miss Sanford's unconquerable prejudice. Pretences for
rupture were easily found; the rupture came; Mrs. Sanford did all the
talking, Miss Sanford said nothing. When her father came home from the
city he found his new wife in tears and his daughter fled. The Frenchman
who wrote _les absents ont toujours tort_ was undoubtedly thinking of
the field as left in possession of a woman, and that Mrs. Sanford's
recital of the trouble was a finished calumny at Marion's expense we are
spared the necessity of asserting. In her few words written to her
father that day, Miss Sanford simply said that she was going to pay a
brief visit to the Zabriskies; but in less than a fortnight, with his
full consent and a liberal allowance, she went with them abroad. That
his experiences in his new marital relations were not blissful we may
conjecture from the fact that he soon found reason to believe that he
couldn't believe Mrs. Sanford. Unbelief grew to conviction and developed
into profound distrust. Still, as she not infrequently had to remind
him, she was his lawfully wedded wife, and held the fort. He aged
rapidly, and his struggles for the mastery were futile. She was young,
active, healthy, and wise as the serpent. He mourned for his absent
daughter, and when, yielding to her own yearnings, she returned to
America in the spring of the Centennial year, he sent for her to come to
him. She went, and remained as long as she could, but in leaving, she
told him, with e