little
cottage, with the understanding that as soon as the matter could be
arranged, she was to enter a certain boarding-school in Troy with the
mistress of which I was acquainted. Meanwhile she was to go out to
service at Melville and earn enough money to provide herself with
clothes.

"I was a careless fellow in those days but I kept my promise to that
girl. I not only entered her into that school for a course of three
years, but acting through its mistress who had taken a great fancy to
her, supplied her with the necessities her position required. It was so
easy; merely the signing of a check from time to time, and it was
done. I say this because I really think if it had involved any personal
sacrifice on my part, even of an hour of my time, or the labor of a
thought, I should not have done it. For with my return to the city my
interest in my cousin revived, absorbing me to such an extent that any
matter disconnected with her soon lost all charm for me.

"Two years passed; I was the slave of Evelyn Blake, but there was no
engagement between us. My father's determined opposition was enough to
prevent that. But there was an understanding which I fondly hoped would
one day open for me the way of happiness. But I did not know my father.
Sick as he was--he was at that time laboring under the disease which in
a couple of months later bore him to the tomb--he kept an eye upon my
movements and seemed to probe my inmost heart. At last he came to a
definite decision and spoke.

"His words opened a world of dismay before me. I was his only child, as
he remarked, and it had been and was the desire of his heart to leave
me as rich and independent a man as himself. But I seemed disposed
to commit one of those acts against which he had the most determined
prejudice; marriage between cousins being in his eyes an unsanctified
and dangerous proceeding, liable to consequences the most unhappy. If I
persisted, he must will his property elsewhere. The Blake estate should
never descend with the seal of his approbation to a race of probable
imbeciles.

"Nor was this enough. He not only robbed me of the woman I loved,
but with a clear insight into the future, I presume, insisted upon
my marrying some one else of respectability and worth before he died.
'Anyone whose appearance will do you credit and whose virtue is beyond
reproach,' said he. 'I don't ask her to be rich or even the offspring of
one of our old families. Let her be good