ar and touching loveliness. I have never seen a woman that so
completely realized the highest _Madonna_ type of youthful, matronly
beauty--its starlight radiance and mild serenity of sorrow. Her voice,
too, gentle and low, had a tone of patient sadness in it strangely
affecting. She was evidently a person, if not of high birth, of refined
manners and cultivated mind; and I soon ceased to wonder at warm-hearted
old Sir Jasper's enthusiasm in her cause. Habitually, however, on my
guard against first impressions, I courteously, but coldly, invited her
first to a seat, and next to a more intelligible relation of her business
with me than could be gathered from the letter of which she was the
bearer. She complied, and I was soon in possession of the following facts
and fancies:--

Violet Dalston and her sister Emily had lived for several years in close
and somewhat straitened retirement with their father, Captain Dalston, at
Rock Cottage, on the outskirts of a village about six miles distant from
Leeds, when Captain Dalston, who was an enthusiastic angler, introduced
to his home a gentleman about twenty-five years of age, of handsome
exterior and gentlemanly manners, with whom congeniality of tastes and
pursuits had made him acquainted. This stranger was introduced to Violet
(my interesting client) and her sister, as a Mr. Henry Grainger, the son
of a London merchant. The object of his wanderings through the English
counties was, he said, to recruit his health, which had become affected
by too close application to business, and to gratify his taste for
angling, sketching, and so on. He became a frequent visitor; and the
result, after the lapse of about three months, was a proposal for the
hand of Violet. His father allowed him, he stated, five hundred pounds
per annum; but in order not to mortally offend the old gentleman, who was
determined, if his son married at all, it should be either to rank or
riches, it would be necessary to conceal the marriage till after his
death. This commonplace story had been, it appeared, implicitly credited
by Captain Dalston; and Violet Dalston and Henry Grainger were united in
holy wedlock--not at the village church near where Captain Dalston
resided, but in one of the Leeds churches. The witnesses were the
bride's father and sister, and a Mr. Bilston, a neighbor. This marriage
had taken place rather more than seven years since, and its sole fruit
was the fine-looking boy who accompanied his