enjoyed most keenly seeing Ellen in a wider and more
appreciative circle. I spent a large part of the first winter in their
house, and shared all their social pleasures, and looked forward to ever
increasing delight, as my nieces should grow old enough to enter into
society.

Early in the spring I went to the West and passed the entire summer with
relatives; I heard from my sister every week; her letters were always
cheerful and natural, and I returned to her in the autumn, full of
anticipations of another gay and pleasant winter.

They met me in New York, and I remembered afterwards, though in the
excitement of the moment I gave it no second thought, that when John
Gray's eyes first met mine, there was in them a singular and indefinable
expression, which roused in me an instant sense of distrust and
antagonism. He had never thoroughly liked me. He had always had an
undercurrent of fear of me. He knew I thought him weak: he felt that I had
never put full confidence in him. That I really and truly loved him was
small offset for this. Would it not be so to all of us?

This part of my story is best told in few words. I had not been at home
one week before I found that rumor had been for some months coupling John
Gray's name with the name of Mrs. Emma Long, a widow who had but just
returned to----, after twelve years of married life in Cuba. John had
known her in her girlhood, but there had never been any intimacy or even
friendship between them. My sister, however, had known her well, had
corresponded with her during all her life at the South, and had invited
her to her house immediately upon her return to----. Emma Long was a
singularly fascinating woman. Plain and sharp and self-asserting at
twenty-two, she had become at thirty-five magnetic and winning, full of
tact, and almost beautiful. We see such surprising developments
continually: it seems as if nature did her best to give every woman one
period of triumph and conquest; perhaps only they know its full sweetness
to whom it comes late. In early youth it is accepted unthinkingly, as is
the sunshine,--enjoyed without deliberation, and only weighed at its
fullness when it is over. But a woman who begins at thirty to feel for the
first time what it is to have power over men, must be more or less than
woman not to find the knowledge and the consciousness dangerously sweet.

I never knew--I do not know to-day, whether Emma Long could be justly
called a coquette. That