so submit to
sacrifice his money. The other alternative was (as he expressed it
himself) to "have his pennyworth for his penny, and to turn his family
to good account in New York." He had not quite decided what to do when
he got home again on the evening of his marriage.

At that critical moment in her life the bride was equal to the demand on
her resources.

If she was foolish enough to allow James to act on his natural impulses,
there were probably two prospects before her. In one state of his
temper, he might knock her down. In another state of his temper, he
might leave her behind him. Her only hope of protecting herself, in
either case, was to tame the bridegroom. In his absence, she wisely
armed herself with the most irresistible fascinations of her sex. Never
yet had he seen her dressed as she was dressed when he came home. Never
yet had her magnificent eyes looked at him as they looked now. Emotions
for which he was not prepared overcame this much injured man; he stared
at the bride in helpless surprise. That inestimable moment of weakness
was all Mrs. Bellbridge asked for. Bewildered by his own transformation,
James found himself reading the newspaper the next morning
sentimentally, with his arm round his wife's waist.

By a refinement of cruelty, not one word had been said to prepare little
Syd for the dreary change that was now close at hand in her young life.
The poor child had seen the preparations for departure, and had tried to
imitate her mother in packing up. She had collected her few morsels of
darned and ragged clothing, and had gone upstairs to put them into
one of the dilapidated old trunks in the garret play ground, when the
servant was sent to bring her back to the sitting-room. There, enthroned
in an easy-chair, sat a strange lady; and there, hiding behind the chair
in undisguised dislike of the visitor, was her little brother Roderick.
Syd looked timidly at her mother; and her mother said:

"Here is your aunt."

The personal appearance of Miss Wigger might have suggested a modest
distrust of his own abilities to Lavater, when that self-sufficient man
wrote his famous work on Physiognomy. Whatever betrayal of her inner
self her face might have presented, in the distant time when she was
young, was now completely overlaid by a surface of a flabby fat which,
assisted by green spectacles, kept the virtues (or vices) of this
woman's nature a profound secret until she opened her lips. When sh