the temples--I could willingly have stricken that audacious scrutinizer
in the face with my clinched hand, and he knew it! How coarse coarseness
makes us, even when most disinclined to it naturally! His sensuous
brutality made me almost fiercely brutal in turn. As it was, I could
only put him away with a gesture of contempt I sought not to command,
and with which I swept past him into the thickest of the crowd, cursing
at heart the bitter fate that had cast me bound and helpless, for a
season, into such unscrupulous hands.

There was no one to turn to now. I knew Mr. Lodore thought Evelyn
perfect, and me a sinner, because in the matter of church duties she was
the more observant. Besides, my Jewish pedigree had always been a
barrier between us. Dr. Pemberton, Mr. Stanbury, Laura, George Gaston,
all that truly loved and believed in me, were gone for an indefinite
time to Europe. I had not been suffered to accompany them, on many pleas
and pretences, as I had wished to do, and this was the end of it all.
Licentious persecution!

Evelyn, too! a blinded confederate in such schemes as should have nerved
her woman's heart to indignation rather! Marry that man! I would have
cut off my own right hand, or burnt it to a cinder like Scaevola;
sooner gone out to service--played chambermaid on the boards, or the
tragedy-queen of the commonest melodrama, far rather! It was all insult,
injury, degradation, in whatever light I could view it, and every
feeling in my nature was stung to exasperation.

It was well understood that I was an heiress, and I did not want for
adulation. I was surrounded by fashion and beauty, and wreathed with
approbation from the noblest and most exalted, on that night of festal
splendor; and again that beautiful face that had cast its spell above me
in my inexperienced childhood, and that age never seemed to change nor
chill, bent above me with its gracious and genial sweetness, and the
princely banker on this occasion condescended to manifest his kindly and
approving interest in the daughter of his dead friend. At any other
time, such tribute would have been most grateful and acceptable to me,
for this man was almost my _beau ideal_ at this period, but now the
bitterness with which my heart was filled, permeated my whole being, and
dashed every draught of enjoyment untasted from my lips.

Yet the memory of that time--that face--returned to me later with
emotions irresistible, when the being who was then