The plantation of Mr. Donaldson was delightfully located in a most lovely region of hill and dale, sparkling with delicious rivulets, and sprinkled with charming groves of the deep-tinted pimento, the graceful palm, and magnificent cotton-trees, and the air rife with the fragrance of the orange and citron blossoms, through which, like winged jewels, glanced birds of the most brilliant plumage. Whatever may have been the errors which Mr. Dundass detected in the moral character of Mr. Donaldson, he was a most tender and devoted husband; and in this paradise to which he had brought her, the happiness of Helen seemed perfect. The Cascade, as Mr. Donaldson had named his station, from the numerous little rills and waterfalls in the neighborhood, was distant fifty miles from Mount Dundass, yet the intercourse between father and daughter continued uninterrupted until the infirmities of age pressing upon Mr. Dundass, rendered his visits to the Cascade less frequent, and the cares of a growing family confining Mrs. Donaldson more closely at home. Helen was now the mother of several children, charming, bright little girls, yet it was strange that Mr. Dundass never seemed to regard them in the same tender light he did Mildred Ward. Mr. Donaldson had never seen Mildred, but already in his heart he hated her. The partiality of the grandfather rankled his inmost soul, for he saw plainly it would interfere with the prospects of his own children. Indeed, Mr. Dundass had already settled fifty thousand dollars upon his granddaughter Mildred, asserting also that at his death that sum should be doubled. Mr. Donaldson possessed great influence over his wife--his words to her were oracles--his wishes laws. By degrees, therefore, he instilled into her mind a jealousy against her absent child, mingled with feelings of resentment toward her father, that, to the exclusion of her little Grace and Anna, he should have made her the object of his love and munificence. This feeling once engendered Mr. Donaldson took good care to keep alive. The poison worked slowly but so secretly, that no doubt Helen herself would have been shocked could she have read her own heart and found that, instigated by jealousy, a mother's tenderness for her first-born was fast turning to bitterness. In the meantime seventeen rosy summers had flitted as some fairy dream over the head of Mildred, when her grandfather, no longer able to resist his desire of seeing her, urged her return to Jamaica. CHAPTER III. To merry England our story now takes us, that we may trace a brief sketch of those scenes wherein the days of Mildred had glided so happily away.