Born in Martinique, and reared amongst a slave population, the youthful Elinor at sixteen had never known any restraint but that of her parents' indulgent rule; she had never felt the salutary yoke of the hard and fast laws of society. But at this period of her life her beauty, which had begun to make some stir in the place, aroused the admiration of M. de Roselis, the richest settler in the island. He came forward to ask for her hand, and his wealth so dazzled her ambitious relatives that it was granted immediately. He was a man of some forty years, with a handsome face but a character as odious as it was contemptible. He had been the overseer of the property he now owned, and had spent his life there, and the habit of command had developed in him all those vices which invariably spring from isolation and unlimited power. Suspicious and violent, unprincipled and unscrupulous, his vanity, flattered by the possession of the handsomest girl in the colony, soon effaced in him any sentiment for her except that of a mean jealousy, which he indulged with the inflexibility of his imperious temper. Elinor, shut up amongst her Negresses, over whom she had no control--many of them being, indeed, her own rivals--had now to endure the vilest treatment. Her proud and sensitive heart was filled with a deep-rooted resentment, and she visited on all men the hatred and contempt which were merited by the only one whom she had opportunity of judging. Her parents died of grief at having thus sacrificed their only child, and shortly after her husband, worn out by a manner of life whose pleasures he had thoroughly exhausted, began to make preparations to remove to France. He had already arranged for the purchase of an estate in that country, when he was suddenly overtaken by death in the midst of a debauch. Thus the beautiful Elinor de Roselis found herself at the age of twenty-five at once the richest and most independent woman in the colony, but, disgusted with a place in which she had known only sorrow, she resolved to put into execution her husband's plans, and settle in France. One of her childhood friends, Mme. de Gernancé, who had been more fortunate than herself in marriage, was also about to remove with her family and fortune to France, so a vessel was chartered for them, and Mme. de Roselis, having once more vowed on the tomb of her parents to give no man in future a right to dispose of her person and fate went on board, her mind filled with a thousand schemes, and nursing as many fond hopes. In the first years of her unhappy married life Mme. de Roselis had suffered keenly from her disappointment in having no children; later she found consolation in the fear lest a child of hers should inherit the vices that caused her such lasting and acute pain.