of being spoken to familiarly, fondly, and gratefully by a woman whose
language and manners still retained enough of their early refinement
to hint at the high social station that she had lost, would have been a
dangerous luxury to a man of Isaac's rank at the age of twenty. But it
was far more than that--it was certain ruin to him--now that his heart
was opening unworthily to a new influence at that middle time of life
when strong feelings of all kinds, once implanted, strike root most
stubbornly in a man's moral nature. A few more stolen interviews after
that first morning in Fuller's Meadow completed his infatuation. In less
than a month from the time when he first met her, Isaac Scatchard had
consented to give Rebecca Murdoch a new interest in existence, and a
chance of recovering the character she had lost by promising to make her
his wife.

She had taken possession, not of his passions only, but of his faculties
as well. All the mind he had he put into her keeping. She directed
him on every point--even instructing him how to break the news of his
approaching marriage in the safest manner to his mother.

"If you tell her how you met me and who I am at first," said the cunning
woman, "she will move heaven and earth to prevent our marriage. Say I am
the sister of one of your fellow-servants--ask her to see me before you
go into any more particulars--and leave it to me to do the rest. I mean
to make her love me next best to you, Isaac, before she knows anything
of who I really am." The motive of the deceit was sufficient to sanctify
it to Isaac. The stratagem proposed relieved him of his one great
anxiety, and quieted his uneasy conscience on the subject of his mother.
Still, there was something wanting to perfect his happiness, something
that he could not realize, something mysteriously untraceable, and yet
something that perpetually made itself felt; not when he was absent
from Rebecca Murdoch, but, strange to say, when he was actually in her
presence! She was kindness itself with him. She never made him feel
his inferior capacities and inferior manners. She showed the sweetest
anxiety to please him in the smallest trifles; but, in spite of all
these attractions, he never could feel quite at his ease with her. At
their first meeting, there had mingled with his admiration, when he
looked in her face, a faint, involuntary feeling of doubt whether that
face was entirely strange to him. No after familiarity had the sl