Agnes Surriage responded at once to the new influences about her. Indeed, she was of those to whom borrowed graces are external and almost unnecessary: Nature had dowered her with the riches of beauty, nobility, and modesty of mien; and to adorn her by artifice was merely to remove the rose from its garden bed, and set it in a silver vase. From God’s lady, fitted to scrub the tavern floor and lose no charm thereby, she became a dame who might have been commended to courts and palaces. She learned to sing, to play on the harpsichord, and dance; for painting, embroidery, and all the fragile accomplishments of the day, she had a surprising aptitude. She was surrounded by luxuries which might have proved bewildering to a less simple and noble nature, and, last of all, she stooped to receive the crown of her guardian’s love. Alas! poor maid of Marblehead! for this was a crown that smirched the brow and stung as with nettles, no matter how bravely its blossoms nodded above. Frankland loved her, but he was bound by the fetters of an ancestral pride; he owed all to his family, and nothing to his own manly honor,—and he could not marry her. It is pitiful to guess with what tragic battlings of heart and conscience her overthrow must have been accomplished, but even she could scarcely have counted the cost,—the daily torture, the hourly pinch of circumstance, when one after another of Boston’s best, who had not failed to recognize the fisher-girl, rich in nothing but her dower of beauty and character, refused to countenance the fine lady, so ironically favored of Fortune. In the humble home at Marblehead, her name became the keynote of shame; for though these fisher-folk were rude of speech almost beyond belief, though they caroused wildly half the year, preparatory to their summer voyaging, they had a hard hand and a rough word ready for one who was light o’ love. She had given all for the one jewel, and both her little worlds, of birth and adoption, trembled from their centres. All the more did she turn to Frankland, as to her sun of happiness, and in the unfailing warmth of his affection she alternately drooped and smiled. [Illustration: “All the more did she turn to Frankland”]