stores and resources as her person was in feminine graces. Her life up to that time had been a checkered, and in the main, a very unhappy one, for her refinement, nature, education, character and acquirements, were such as to demand a broader, higher, better social sphere than what, from pecuniary want, she now occupied and moved in. Another cause of unrest was that she was maritally mismatched altogether, for her husband, after years of absence, during which she had deemed him dead, and contracted a second alliance with the father of her boy, had suddenly returned, and never from that moment did she receive one particle of what her heart yearned for--that domestic love and sympathy, ever the matron’s due, and which alone can render life a blessing, and smooth the rugged, thorny pathway to the tomb. Flora Beverly claimed immediate kindred with the red-skinned sons of the northern wilderness, but that blood in her veins mingled with the finer current derived from her ancestor, the Cid--a strain of royal blood that in the foretime had nerved noble-souled men to deeds of valor, and fired the souls of Spanish poets to lofty achievements in the rosy fields of immortal song. She had been tenderly reared--perhaps too much so--for her strange and wonderful beauty, flashing out upon the world from her large and lustrous eyes, and beaming forth from every feature and movement, had been such that she had become marked in community from early childhood, and her parents, looking upon her as a special providence to them, had unwisely cultured qualities in her that had better have been held in abeyance. By over-care and morbid solicitude they had nearly spoiled God’s handiwork, and she grew up an imperious, self-willed, exacting, and sensitive queen. She married, and expected to find herself the centre of a realm of unalloyed joy and delight, wherein her reign would be undisputed. The man she wedded took her for her beauty, expecting to realize a perfect heaven in its possession. Both were bitterly disappointed. The man could appreciate only the external and superficial qualities and excellences of his wife, while her inner, higher, better self--her soul, was a _terra incognita_ to him, which, like so many other husbands, he never even once dreamed of exploring; he had no idea whatever of the inestimable qualities of her heart, intellect, or spirit, and he had never found out that her body is the least a woman gives away--that she has gifts so regal for the man she loves, that glittering diamonds are sparkless, insipid, valueless in comparison.