endure it. Well, I went, and all seemed as fair and promising as we had hoped. I was very young, only eighteen, and with little knowledge of the world."

"Only a year younger than I am," responded Nancy.

"Then you can understand the impression which would be made upon a young and romantic creature when she meets a man who answers to her girlish ideal, a man full of enthusiasm, ardent, imaginative, a musician, a writer, full of schemes which to him, and to so young a girl, appeared such as would work wonders in this sorry world. I was fairly carried off my feet, swept along by the current of his passion. His lovemaking was such as one reads of, but which does not always bring the happiest issues, yet to me a man so eager, so enthusiastic, so full of sentimentality could not fail to seem wonderful. That I, a simple girl, should be wakened by a serenader in picturesque cloak who sang fervid love songs under my window, who would tell me that night after night he watched in the shadows till my light went out; whom I saw waiting below to behold my face when I drew my curtain in the early morning, was nothing less than ideal. Of course all these things made their appeal as they have done a thousand times to a thousand other foolish maids. He questioned me about my home, my family. Did I have another lover? Was he the first? Had I left anyone in England whom I had reason to think might care for me? I had to confess that there was one who had liked me well enough to beg me to remain as his wife, but that I had not thought of him in any such relation, that he was only a poor curate, and that my mother was my first thought. Of this possible admirer he was madly jealous and seemed to think if I did not consent to an immediate marriage that he might lose me. So at last I yielded to the intensity of his persuasions and one night I slipped away secretly and married him, a man I knew scarcely more about than I have told you. The good people whom I left so abruptly were naturally furiously indignant, and I lost a friendship which might have served me well in later days if I had not been so foolishly precipitate."

"But it must have been an ideal love," murmured Nancy.

"It seemed so to me then, and it was for the time being. We were deliriously happy for a year, then my little son came and my husband began to resent my devotion to the child, although he adored him, for none loves and considers his children more than a Spaniard."

"He was a Spaniard? You didn't tell me that," remarked Nancy, who was intensely interested in the 

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