By the haughty relatives of Eccleson she was received either with formal courtesy, or with that condescending air of patronage, the most keenly cutting to a sensitive soul. She would have loved them, poor girl, if they would have suffered her love; but her advances were always chillingly repelled—they wished her to feel the vast difference which existed between a shopkeeper’s daughter and their “almighty dreadful little mightinesses.” Eccleson loved his young wife as dearly as it was in his nature to love any one, save _self_—and all _but_ his pride, would have sacrificed to her happiness. To a gay round of parties, _soirées_, the opera, theatres, and concerts, he bore her night after night, until any less gentle nature than Annette’s would have been lost in the giddy whirl of fashion. Her dresses, her jewels, her equipage, out-rivaled all others; she was the belle of the brilliant circle in which she moved; but she pined in her gilded prison, and longed to lay her aching head upon her mother’s bosom. The very fact that her husband looked upon her relatives as inferior to himself, marked the galling dependence of her situation. She was his wife, but fettered by bonds which ate into her soul. Almost wholly was she now debarred from the society of her own friends—for she could not see them insulted, and no better than insult was the haughty bearing which Eccleson assumed toward them, and therefore she preferred they should think her the heartless thing she seemed, than by persisting in her claims, subject them and herself to renewed contumely. Better would it have been for Annette had she possessed more firmness of character—a _will_ to do as she pleased—a determination to have her rights respected. But she was by nature too gentle to wrestle with the unfeeling hearts around her, and therefore yielded herself a passive victim. Or better, perhaps, would it have been, had her bosom covered a marble heart, and that, callous to all the tender ties which can make life desirable, she should have walked through life that mysterious anomaly—a beautiful woman without a soul! But it was not so. The step of Annette gradually lost its light elastic tread—her cheek grew pale—her eyes no longer reflected the innocent gayety of a happy heart, but bent low their drooping lids as if to hide their weight of sorrow—the bright smile which lent its charms to her speaking countenance faded sadly away. In less than two years after her marriage with that proud, haughty man, poor Annette was dying—dying of a broken-heart—of crushed and blighted affection! Too late to save her did Eccleson see his error. He saw that he had drawn too strongly upon her gentle, pliant nature, and that barred from the light and sun of her childhood’s home—shut out from the kindly sympathies of parental love, like some beautiful flower of the forest torn from its genial bed, she was to fade and die at ambition’s altar!