"Seek not to know it, save at my bidding, I beseech you! I marvel at times that it has not been sooner discovered; yet, well, it is far better so. Now listen, Primrose, to my tale.... "The story of my early life, of my relationship to your guardian, of my secret marriage with your father against my own father's will or knowledge--that part of my tale you shall hear fully at another time. "I will now pass over my early disobedience and sin, and begin my story at the time when the consequences of my ill-doing first thrust themselves miserably into my girlish dreams of bliss, and shattered them at my feet. I married at just over one-and-twenty years of age--a wayward, impulsive child still in all my words and actions, very beautiful, so my proud young husband constantly assured me, but, as you must know, from the fact of my being the boatman's kinswoman, and therefore of humble parentage, utterly ignorant, not only of the ways of the great world, but of all those arts of education which befitted her whom the Earl of Bryn Afon should choose as his wife and the partner of such a life as he was called upon to lead. I had, like yourself, heard nought of the curse, beyond the flying rumours passing ever from mouth to mouth about the country-side, and in my daring youth, rather rejoiced over my own bravery in thus wilfully ignoring its existence, and consenting to share the life of one who thought himself surely doomed in his turn to bear its woful burden. The first few months of our married life were spent in travelling, and passed by in one short dream of bliss, from which the first awakening came when my husband took me to town, and began, among his gay and educated companions, to discover that I was on all points of worldly knowledge but as an ignorant child, unable, in spite of my proud bearing, to take that part in the life and conversation of the Court which he had rashly expected of me, and I as rashly had ne'er dreamed of being unable to fulfil. It would be wronging him to say that he at any time conveyed to me his disappointment and chagrin in open words of blame, but I grew daily more conscious of the presence of such feeling in his thoughts, and of my own unfitness for my new station; and by-and-by, to add to my secret trouble, came the knowledge of my husband's sad failing--a cross to me all through my life--his inability to resist the direful temptations of strong drink. This knowledge too only grew upon me gradually, but ere I had been a year married it had become too evident, and I could no longer blind my love-bound eyes to the sad fact of my husband's miserable weakness. At last the climax came to my misery, when one evening, while under the influence of wine, he revealed to me the secret which he had vowed never to disclose lest it should mar my happiness--the dread secret of the curse of the Bryn Afons family. That I will not reveal to you, my sweet daughter, for since in your up-bringing I