“This sudden and tragic ending of a man of energy and will, was also the reason, perhaps, why Grotewell never arrived at the truth of Jacqueline’s history. Boston was a long way from here in those days, and the story of her lover’s death was not generally known, while the fact of her elopement was. Consequently she was supposed to have fled with the man who had been seen to visit her most frequently; a report which neither the Colonel nor myself had the courage to deny. “My child, you have a brow like snow, and a cheek like roses; you know little of life’s sorrows and little of life’s sins. To you the skies are blue, the woods vernal, the air balmy; the sad looks upon men’s and women’s faces, tell but shallow tales of the ceaseless grinding of grief in their pent up souls. But you are gentle, and you have an imagination that goes beyond your experience; perhaps if you pause and think, you can understand what a tale could be told of the weeks and months and years that now followed, without hint or whisper of the fate of her who had gone out from amongst us with the brand of her father’s curse upon her brow. At first we hoped, yes, _he_ hoped,—I could see it in his eyes when there came a sudden ring at the bell,—that some sign of her penitence, or some proof of her existence, would come to relieve the torture of our fears, if not the shame of our memories. But the door that closed upon her on that fatal eve, had shut without an echo. While we vainly waited, time had ample leisure to carve the furrows of age as well as of suffering on the Colonel’s once smooth brow, and to change my daily vigil into a custom of despair, rather than of hope. Time had also leisure to rob us of much of our worldly goods and to make our continued living in this grand old house, an act that involved constant care and the closest economy. That we were enabled to preserve appearances to the day that beheld the Colonel laid low by the final stroke of his dread disease, was only due to the secret charity of a certain gentleman, who, declaring he was indebted to us, secretly supplied me with means of support. “But of all this you care little.