“No, mother, not a word, now nor ever. I can’t bear it. I almost hate the Schuylers, and I wish I, too, was dead.” It was not often that Heloise was thus moved, and her mother looked at her curiously, but she said no more of the Schuylers or Abelard, and busied herself with putting the cottage to rights and preparing a tempting little supper for her daughter. But Heloise could not eat, and after the supper was cleared away and her mother had taken her usual seat upon the back porch, she crept to her side, and putting her head in her lap, said entreatingly: “Mother, I have something to tell you which will surprise and probably offend you. I ought to have told it before, but I was afraid and kept putting it off. It was wrong, I know, but it cannot now be helped. Abelard and I were married!” “You married to Abelard Lyle!” Mrs. Fordham exclaimed, starting back as if a serpent had stung her. She did not say, “I am glad then that he is dead,” but she thought it, and the thought must have communicated itself to Heloise, for she lifted up her head and looked reproachfully in her mother’s face, while her lip quivered in a grieved kind of way, but she did not cry, and her voice was steady as she said: “Oh, mother, don’t speak so to me, as if marrying him was the most disgraceful thing I could do. I loved him so much, and he loved me. It was during the long voyage when I saw so much of him. You know you were sick most of the time, and that left me to him, and he was so kind, and before we reached New York I promised to be his wife some time, and meant to tell you.” “Why didn’t you, then?” The tone was harsh and unrelenting in which Mrs. Fordham put this question, and Heloise flushed a little and answered, hurriedly: “It was wrong, I know, but you are, you were,—forgive me, mother,—you are prouder, more ambitious than I am. You think I might marry a nobleman, and I shrank from telling you for fear you would separate us and that time you went to Hoboken and stayed a week with your friend, Abelard persuaded me to be married. We could keep it a secret, he said, until he had something beforehand and was in a better position.” “Umph! As if he could rise to a better position. Child, with your face and manner you might be the first lady in the land, instead of throwing yourself away on a poor carpenter.” Mrs. Fordham spoke very bitterly, and her eyes had in them a hard, angry look, which roused all the temper there was in the young girl, who answered, hotly: “Abelard’s profession was an honorable one. Joseph was a carpenter. Abelard was not to blame for being poor; one of his sisters married into as good a family as there is in Scotland, and had he lived he would have risen above poverty and obscurity. America has many avenues for such as he, and I should one day have been so proud of him. Oh, my darling, my husband!”