Her conjugal love was her master passion—jealousy her besetting sin—and her jealousy was morbid as her love was extravagant. In losing her very soul in his heart, she wished to FILL that heart to the exclusion of every other object. I repeat it here, she wished to be everything to the being who was everything to her—she wished for matchless beauty, peerless genius, not that she might be generally admired, but that she might meet and supply every demand of his soul. But now! but now! here was one more richly and rarely endowed by nature with the power of pleasing than herself, one who charmed all the world, and who must, she fancied, charm _her_ world, her universe away from her life. She wished to be—oh! _not_ from vanity, but from love to please _his_ poet-mind—she wished to be the fairest in her husband’s sight—but here was one fairer, oh, how much fairer than herself—she wished to be the most graceful, yet here was one whose every movement was the very “poetry of motion”—she wished that _her_ voice in household cadences, or in song, might fall the sweetest on his ears; yet here was one, whose artless tones were melodious as the fall of waters or the notes of birds. Their evenings! Rosalia would sit at the piano singing the low, sweet melodies he loved, while he stood at the back of her chair, turning over the music, bending above her, smiling benignly on her, forgetful of everything but of her and her song, sometimes joining his voice to hers—and she! how often at the end of a song she would turn around and give him a soft, beaming smile of affectionate pleasure, when she felt that she had pleased him. How little the innocent girl dreamed of the mischief she was doing—how indeed should she have suspected it? Had she not played and sung for Captain Wilde every evening on the Rainbow, and had she not always been rewarded by smiles, praises, caresses, and kisses, from Sophie and from Captain Wilde, too? No, she did not guess the evil she was causing—she did not guess it even when she saw, evening after evening, that Hagar withdrew herself from the instrument and buried herself in a distant deep arm-chair, or left the room. There _was one_ who observed and defied her displeasure—Raymond, who occasionally raising himself from his recumbent posture over Rosalia’s chair, would turn, and darting his eyes fiercely into the obscurity of Hagar’s retreat, and fixing them sternly upon her, would bring her by a look back to his side, sighing, trembling, dejected—then smiling sweetly on her, and passing his arm around her little waist, would hold her there, and look supremely blessed while thus caressing _her_ and listening to Rosalia’s music.