For three days Philip Benson lingered near his beautiful enslaver; on the fourth, he carried a sad, yet trustful heart upon his Southern journey. Sarah had not seen him once since the evening of his coming. Through Lucy, she received his adieux and wishes for her speedy recovery. On the next day but one she left her room, and appeared again in the family circle--now complete in all its parts. In that short season of bodily prostration, the work of years had been wrought upon her inner life. Outwardly there was little alteration save that effected by physical weakness; but in her views of existence and character, of affections and motives, the doubter had become the skeptic; the dreamer the misanthrope. To the gentle and more womanly aspirations that had for a season supplanted the somewhat masculine tendencies of her mind and tastes had succeeded a stoicism, like the frozen calm of a winter's day, uniform as relentless. This was the surface that locked and concealed the lower depths she had sworn should be forever covered. Others could and did live without hearts. She could thrive as well upon the husks and Sodom apples of this world's goods as did they; holding as Life's chief good, complete and final subjugation of all genuine emotion, which, at the best, was but the rough ore--fit for nothing until purged, refined, and polished in its glitter. She found no other creed that suited her present desperate mood so well as the heartless code of the thorough worldling--the devotee to show, and fashion, and wealth. Such was her mother, whose domestic virtues were extolled by all who knew her; such, behind her mask of tender grace and amiability, the sister who had won, by these factitious attractions, the heart for which Sarah would have perilled life, sacrificed ease and inclination, bowed her proud spirit to the estate of bond-servant to his every caprice, become the willing slave to his tyrannical behest. Yet Philip Benson was a professed judge of character; a man of sense, education, and experience, and, knowing both girls as he did, he had made his choice; set the stamp of his approval upon the shining, rather than the solid metal. The world, as its young would-be disciple believed she had at length learned, was made up of two classes; those who floated, and those who sank. To the latter she determined that she would not belong.