“You needn’t ask me; I have no right to keep her from you. Eva has been a good girl, take her; but let her come home sometimes for Ruthy’s sake.” After this there was a passionate clinging of arms, warm kisses, and a tearful face, looking wistfully through the carriage window, as Mrs. Carter drove away with her adopted daughter, for the whole affair amounted to that, under the guise of an agreement. In less than a week it was known throughout the fashionable world that the wealthy Carters had adopted that beautiful girl, Eva Laurence, and intended to make her an heiress. It was also known that the whole Laurence family had been benefited by the change—that a delicate, lovely girl, who had been a great sufferer from childhood, had developed such wonderful talent for painting, that Mr. Ross had taken her for a pupil. This was all true. From that humble cottage Eva had passed into a life so luxurious and pleasant, that it realized all her ideas of paradise. No more work, no walking up and down town in drifting snow or driving rain. Warmth, beauty and kindness, surrounded her on every hand. Her love of the beautiful was gratified to the full. It seemed to her that there was hardly a thing on earth which was not given to her wishes. “Yes, one.” But she would not think of that; Fate had forbidden her to love; in giving her everything else, that great first boon of womanhood had been withheld. But she had in exchange that sweet, pure, fatherly affection, which seemed to have been taken away forever when Laurence died. No one could be more generally kind than Mr. Carter, but it was on the artist Ross that her heart rested with more than filial affection; his loving patience, his tender assiduity, sometimes won tears of gratitude from the girl. Was this love? Yes, but oh how different to that which lay buried deep in her heart for the man she could not marry. In a few weeks from this the season was at its full, and the Carters plunged into all its gayeties with a zest and brilliancy hitherto unknown to them. To own and introduce a creature so lovely, and so exquisitely refined, into fashionable life, was a crowning glory to the ambition which had urged these new people into society. They accepted invitations—they gave parties—they occupied the most prominent box at the opera, and had the glory of knowing that their protegée, in spite of her humble origin, in spite of envy and persecution, was in fact the Reigning Belle of society. It would be false to say that Eva did not feel this change in her life as a transition into something like fairy land. CHAPTER LXV. IN THE PARK.