Millicent Almsford’s life had not been a happy one. Her childhood had been lonely, and she had none of those early recollections which are so comforting in after years to people more fortunately bred. Her father was an invalid and a bookworm, and looked upon his only daughter as a creature to be fed, clothed, educated, and kept quiet. Her feeding he intrusted to her faithful nurse, who had promised her dying mother never to leave the child till she should be grown to womanhood. Her wardrobe was ordered by a relative who lived in Paris, and who twice a year overlooked the making and packing of her clothes, from her first baby wrappings to the ball dress in which she was presented at the court of St. James. Her education he left very much to chance and her own taste, simply locking up the _livres defendus_ of his library, and telling her English governess to order any necessary volumes from Mudie’s. The young woman in whose charge Millicent was placed, was more eager to learn Italian than to teach English; to explore the literature of Dante than to familiarize her pupil with the British authors. When Millicent was sixteen years old, the feeble protection of this governess was taken from her; the woman returning to England to keep a long protracted marriage engagement with her own cousin. The same year old Nina died; and then it was that the lonely girl fell under the influence which was to darken her destiny and turn aside the natural current of her life. Millicent Almsford, at that age, was a very peculiar and interesting study. Her mind had eagerly grasped much more material than it could master. Her vivid imagination and great talent for music were, with a love of beauty, the most strongly developed traits in her nature, whose intellectual growth was destined to be slow and late; whose spiritual existence had not yet begun. An exquisite native refinement and a perfect taste were among her most interesting qualities. Singularly attractive and strangely incomplete, she had formed few relations; and her friendship with Edward Holworthy, the man whose influence so marred her life, was the first strong feeling which she had known. He was her opposite in character, and knew life only through people, while she had lived purely in ideas. Her complex nature, unfathomable to herself, was to him a novel and engrossing study, and it was through him that she learned to understand one side of it. The man found a great heart which had never loved; a strong power for working good or evil; a bold mind, that feared not to grapple with the deepest problems of life; and a possibility of absolute devotion to a resolution once formed, which is rarely found among young women. He became her mental guide, and directed her readings; with a certain clever intuition bringing her under the influence of minds as sophistical and frivolous as his own. Sympathetic to an extreme degree, her nature quickly took from his the