ession, and he was speaking in
the presence of his wife and daughter; but the truth must be
recorded)--"I know what you are driving at, and I'll break you of your
fancy or I'll break your stubborn neck! You don't like Bancker, the
husband _I_ pick out for you, because he is not a beardless boy, and you
choose to consider him _old_. And you think I will permit you to
encourage that miserable beggar, Frank Wallace, because he is _young_!
Let me see one more sign of familiarity between him and yourself, and I
will kick him out of the house, as I would a dog--and you may go after
him! Do you hear me? Now look out!" And the Judge rang the bell for the
servant, scolded her for not lighting the gas that no one had before
wished lighted, and stormed out of the room, leaving his wife to follow
him, and his daughter to drop again into her chair and muse over the
pleasant prospect for after-life lying so broadly before her.

But if the young girl had passed through an agitating and unpleasant
scene, and if the prospects for her future life had been sensibly
narrowed within the preceding half hour, the depths of her being had not
been stirred as they were to be before she slept. Perhaps she had
occupied the position of depression into which she had fallen, in the
chair by the window, with her head upon her hand, for five minutes--a
bitter sea of thought surging through her mind, and her flash of
resolution so giving way before her father's terrible anger, that she
felt almost ready to sacrifice her happiness, life, every thing, to obey
him and secure peace--when a hand was laid gently upon her shoulder, and
the quiet face of Aunt Martha, framed in its widow's cap, peered into
her own.

"Oh, Aunt, I am so glad you have come down! I was so lonely and so
wretched!" broke out Emily, the moment she felt the touch and saw the
face.

"I have been down some time, sitting in the front parlor by the window,
and trying to make music out of that very-badly-cracked hand-organ that
was playing on the other side of the way," said the widow, taking her
seat by the young girl's side. Perhaps five-and-forty years had passed
over the widowed younger sister of Judge Owen, who made her home in a
quiet upper chamber of his house. But they had not much thinned her tall
and magnificent form, or entirely destroyed, though they had completely
_subdued_, the quiet beauty of her face, which must once have been
strikingly like that of her niece. She had bee