merica. 'I have had trouble enough to get on alone,'
he grumbled. 'What will it be now? To burden myself with a penniless
wife! What egregious folly! And yet I couldn't have acted differently--I
was compelled to do it.' Why had he been compelled to do it? why had
he not acted differently?--that was what I vainly puzzled my brain
to explain. However, his gloomy fears of poverty were not realized. A
delightful surprise awaited him at New York. A relative had recently
died, leaving him a legacy of fifty thousand dollars--a small fortune.
I hoped that he would now cease his constant complaints, but he seemed
even more displeased than before. 'Such is the irony of fate,' he
repeated again and again. 'With this money, I might easily have married
a wife worth a hundred thousand dollars, and then I should be rich at
last!' After that, I had good reason to expect that I should soon be
forsaken--but no, shortly after our arrival, he married me. Had he done
so out of respect for his word? I believed so. But, alas! this marriage
was the result of calculation, like everything else he did.

"We were living in New York, when one evening he came home, looking very
pale and agitated. He had a French newspaper in his hand. 'Read this,'
he said, handing it to me. I took the paper as he bade me, and read
that my brother had not been killed, that he was improving, and that
his recovery was now certain. And as I fell on my knees, bursting into
tears, and thanking God for freeing me from such terrible remorse, he
exclaimed: 'We are in a nice fix! I advise you to congratulate yourself!
'From that time forward, I noticed he displayed the feverish anxiety of
a man who feels that he is constantly threatened with some great danger.
A few days afterward, he said to me: 'I cannot endure this! Have our
trunks ready to-morrow, and we will start South. Instead of calling
ourselves Gordon, we'll travel under the name of Grant.' I did not
venture to question him. He had quite mastered me by his cruel tyranny,
and I was accustomed to obey him like a slave in terror of the lash.
However, during our long journey, I learned the cause of our flight and
change of name.

"'Your brother, d--n him,' he said, one day, 'is hunting for me
everywhere! He wants to kill me or to deliver me up to justice, I don't
know which. He pretends that I tried to murder him!' It was strange;
but Arthur Gordon, who was bravery personified, and who exposed himself
again and again t