The dullest eyes will recognize at last what only the quick and accustomed discern at first. Eleanor Hill had been blind, but her eyes gradually opened,--with an agony in the first gleams of light, of which her yielding, compliant nature had before given little promise. Nearly two years had elapsed after her becoming the ward of Dr. Philip Pomeroy, and more than one year after that fatal era in her own destiny, when the wronged girl, then twenty and within only twelve months of her legal majority, at last sounded the depths of that man's nature sufficiently to know that he had been inventing the existence of obstacles--that he had never intended to marry her, at least at any near period. At that moment of discovery a higher and prouder nature than hers might have been moved to personal upbraiding, despair and perhaps to suicide: with Eleanor Hill the only result was that a sense of shame, before kept in abeyance, came in and settled down upon her, making her more humble than angry or indignant, and unnerving her instead of bracing her mind anew for any conflict that might arise in the future. Aware, at last, of his deception, she could not quite believe in her guardian's utter baseness; and she still _hoped_ that though he might demand his own time for the fulfilment of that promise which had won her from herself, in his own time he would render her that justice in reality so poor but to her so full of compensation for all the past. Would it not seem, even to one most fully acquainted with all the falsehood of the betrayer and all the cruelty of the torturer, that the cup of that man's infamy was nearly filled? And yet--sorrow that the bitter truth must be recorded!--not a tithe of that which was to curse him before the end, has yet been indicated. Slowly and surely the blackening crimes pile up, when the love of virtue and the fear of heaven have both faded out from the human heart; and who can measure the height to which those mountain masses of guilt may tower, after the first foundations have been laid in one unrepented wrong, and before the coming of that day when the criminal must call upon those very mountains to fall and bury him away from the wrath that is inevitable!