Fashionable dissipation promised her nothing. She had often tasted this, to the utmost limit of propriety, and was well aware that the gay whirl had nothing new to offer, unless she plunged into the mad excitement of a life which is as brief as it is vile. It was to her credit that death seemed preferable to this. It was largely due to her defective training and limited experience, that a useful, innocent life, even though it promised to be devoid of happiness, was so utterly repulsive that she was ready to throw it away in impatient disgust. As yet she was incapable of Jennie Burton's divine philosophy of "pleasing not" herself. he who "gave his life for others" was but a name at the pronunciation of which, in the Service, she was accustomed to bow profoundly, but to whom, in her heart, she had never bowed or offered a genuine prayer. Religion seemed to her a sort of fashion which differed with the tastes of different people. She was a practical atheist. It is a fearful thing to permit a child to grow up ignorant of God, and of the sacred principles of duty which should be inwrought in the conscience, and enforced by the most vital considerations of well-being, both for this world and the world to come. But Ida Mayhew thought not of God or duty, but only of her thwarted, unhappy life, from which she shrank weakly and selfishly, assuring herself that she could not and would not endure it. In her father she saw only increasing humiliation; in her mother, one for whom she had but little affection and less respect, and who would of necessity irritate the wounds that time might slowly heal, could she live in an atmosphere of delicate, unspoken sympathy; in herself, one whom she now believed to be so ignorant and faulty that the man she loved had turned away in disgust on finding her out. If all this were not bad enough, unforeseen and unfortunate circumstances, even more than her own folly, had brought about a humiliation from which she felt she could never recover. In her blind, desperate effort to hide her passion from the man she loved, she had made it appear that she was infatuated with the man she loathed, and who had shown himself such a contemptible villain that her association with him was the scandal of the house. If her own mother and cousin could believe that she was ready to throw herself away for the sake of such a wretch, what must the people of the hotel think? What kind of a story would go abroad among her acquaintances in the city? She fairly cringed and writhed at the thought of it all. It seemed to the tortured and morbidly excited girl that there was but one way out of her troubles, and dark and dreadful as was that path, she thought it could lead to nothing so painful as that from which she would escape.