Just then, upon the terrace below there was the sound of a clear, sweet voice, which thrilled him as Emily’s never had, and Edith looked up to the windows of the room adjoining his, where Godfrey was calling to her. It was a beautiful face, and as he watched her gliding away among the shrubbery he thought how she would brighten and adorn his house at Schuyler Hill, and how proud he should be of her when his money had arrayed her in the apparel befitting his wife. Every barrier of pride and prejudice and early training had gone down before Edith Lyle’s wonderful beauty, and the proud, haughty man was ready to offer her his name and hand on one condition. Her mother could not go with her, and in taking him she must give up her family friends, if indeed she had any besides the mother. He knew nothing against Mrs. Barrett, but his sister disliked her, and that was enough, if he ignored, as he tried to think he did, the fact that she took in lodgers and sewing. Many highly respectable ladies did that, he knew, but he had a feeling that Edith’s mother was not highly respectable, and he doubted if she was a lady even. His sister, when questioned with regard to Edith’s family, had reported the mother as a pushing, curious, disagreeable woman, who assumed to be what she certainly was not. “Edith is not like her in the least, and must inherit her natural refinement and delicacy from her father,” Mrs. Sinclair had said, and the colonel was satisfied if one side of the house was _comme il faut_. As a Schuyler he could afford to stoop a little, and he felt that it was stooping to marry his sister’s hired companion. As far as position was concerned, he might as well take poor, plain Ettie Armstrong, the village schoolmistress, who in point of family was undoubtedly Edith’s equal. There was, however, this difference. The people at home could know nothing of Edith’s antecedents, save that she was an English girl and the daughter of a curate; while another fact, which outweighed all else, was her exceeding great beauty and queenly style, which, with proper surroundings and influence, would place her on the highest wave of society. And he was ready to give her the surroundings and the influence, and felt a thrill of exultant pride as he saw her in fancy at the head of his table and moving through his handsome rooms, herself the handsomest appendage there. “I may as well settle it at once,” he thought, and the next day he found his opportunity and took it, with what success the reader will learn from a page in Edith’s diary. CHAPTER XI. EDITH’S DIARY. OAKWOOD, _July 15th, 18—_.