and pure and of no connection
to us, and I will bless her and you with my dying breath.'

"The idea had seized upon him with great force, and I soon saw he was
not to be shaken out of it. To all my objections he returned but the one
word,

"'I don't restrict your choice and I give you a month in which to
make it. If at the end of that time you cannot bring your bride to my
bedside, I must look around for an heir who will not thwart my dying
wishes.'"

"A month! I surveyed the fashionable belles that nightly thronged the
parlors of my friends and felt my heart sink within me. Take one of them
for my wife, loving another woman? Impossible. Women like these demanded
something in return for the honor they conferred upon a man by marrying
him. Wealth? they had it. Position? that was theirs also. Consideration?
ah, what consideration had I to give? I turned from them with distaste.

"My cousin Evelyn gave me no help. She was a proud woman and loved my
money and my expectations as much as she did me.

"'If you must marry another woman to retain your wealth, marry, said
she, 'but do not marry one of my associates. I will have no rival in my
own empire; your wife must be a plainer and a less aspiring woman than
Evelyn Blake. Yet do not discredit your name,--which is mine,' she would
always add.

"Meanwhile the days flew by. If my own conscience had allowed me to
forget the fact, my father's eagerly inquiring, but sternly unrelenting
gaze as I came each evening to his bedside, would have kept it
sufficiently in my mind. I began to feel like one in the power of
some huge crushing machine whose slowly descending weight he in vain
endeavors to escape.

"How or when the thought of Luttra first crossed my mind I cannot
say. At first I recoiled at the suggestion and put it away from me in
disdain; but it ever recurred and with it so many arguments in her favor
that before long I found myself regarding it as a refuge. To be sure she
was a waif and a stray, but that seemed to be the kind of wife demanded
of me. She was allied to rogues if not villains, I knew; but then had
she not cut all connection with them, dropped away from them, planted
her feet on new ground which they would never invade? I commenced to
cherish the idea. With this friendless, grateful, unassuming protegee of
mine for a wife, I would be as little bound as might be. She would
ask nothing, and I need give nothing, beyond a home and the common
attentions requi