Disciplined and chastened as her heart certainly had been in the trials of her life, India was still very far from Christian perfection. And, perhaps, now she needed a little of the sunshine of happiness, as well as the long, long cloud of sorrow, to nurture the growth of goodness in her heart. At all events, she found it very difficult to bear with fortitude the mortification and grief of the night before. She had met him on the steps of one of those Fifth Avenue palaces, where her pupils resided. She had met him! he had passed her, brushing her dress as he went! Though her veil was down, she had recognized him. And she knew by the start that he made, he recognized _her_ as well! Yet he had passed without speaking! Ah! all her thoughts of the future possibilities of a rencounter that she dreaded and shrunk from, had not shaped a meeting so humiliating as this! She _had_ feared that he would seek her out, and, from his pride of place, presume to patronize her, by endeavouring to improve her circumstances, giving her advice, offering her assistance—humiliations which to escape she would have fled to an alms-house—or, perhaps, plunged into a river, “but for the grace of God,” for India was but half regenerated. But a rencounter so mortifying as this, she had never dreamed of. All the circumstances attending that chance meeting also combined to make it inexpressibly galling—_he_ going into that house an honoured guest, for whom its saloons were illuminated and a feast prepared, and a choice company gathered: she creeping out of it, a sort of hired servant with her wages in her hand. So, in the present bitterness of her mood, she looked at herself. And they had so met upon the steps, and he had seen her, recognized her, and passed her without speaking! “Ah! fool!” so she thought; “there was little need to dread that he would seek me out to benefit me. The ‘great statesman’ evidently has no wish to be bored by his poor relations. But oh, Mark! Mark! that _you_ should have done such an unworthy thing! _you_, my one saving idea of manly excellence—that prosperity should have corrupted, and the world hardened, even _you_! When you upbraided me so bitterly, in the midst of my sorrows at Cashmere, I bore it all with a meekness—not very like _me!_ because—oh! because I _saw and felt_ what you would never acknowledge to your own heart—the secret, unacknowledged feeling that gave point, sting, and acrimony to all the bitter reproaches you uttered. Oh! Mark, in that day I read your heart as a woman only can! But all this is over—over—and you pass me without recognition,” she said, sinking into a chair, dropping her head upon her hands, and giving way for the first time in years to a passionate flood of tears. Hark! the bell rings—Oriole goes to the door. It is probably the postman, and India is too much depressed, and has too little to hope, to care much about the coming of that messenger of joy or of woe to so many households. But hark!