Madeline Graham was no common character. Though she had scarcely counted her fifteenth summer, she had grown up tall and stately, with a face almost severe in its fixed and classical beauty, while her manners, calm almost to coldness, were scarcely such as are usually found connected with youthful feeling and girlish simplicity. Educated solely by her parents, Madeline had acquired some of the characteristic traits of both. To her mother’s morbid sensibility and enthusiasm she united her father’s reserve and fixedness of purpose. She possessed strong passions, but an innate power of repressing them seemed born with them. Her love for truth was unbounded; even the common courtesies of society seemed to her but as so many fetters on the limbs of the goddess of her idolatry, and, therefore, even in her girlhood, her manners had become characterized by a sincerity almost amounting to _brusquerie_. Her talents were of the highest order, and her habits of reflection, which were singularly developed in one so young, enabled her to reap a rich harvest of knowledge from her father’s careful culture. She was one to be admired, and praised, and wondered at, but she was scarcely calculated to awaken affection. The spontaneous gush of feeling, the guileless frankness of a heart that knows no evil and dreads no danger, the warm sympathy of a youthful nature, the sweet susceptibility which, though dangerous to its possessor, is yet so winning a trait of girlish character—all these attributes, which seem to belong to the spring-time of life, even as the buds and blossoms are inseparably connected with the renewed youth of the visible creation, were wanting to Madeline.