“You can at least tell me about the child,” Magdalen persisted, and Mrs. Seymour, who by this time was considerably shaken out of her usual reticence and reserve, replied, “Yes, I can do that, trusting to your honor as a lady never to divulge what I may tell you of our family affairs. My brother always had a _penchant_ for pretty faces, and while he was young had several _affairs du cœur_ which came to nothing. When he was forty, or thereabouts, he went to Cincinnati, where he stayed a long time, and at last startled us with the announcement of his marriage with Laura Clayton, a young girl of seventeen, whose beauty, he said, surpassed anything he had ever seen. She was not of high blood, as we held blood, he wrote, but she was wholly respectable, and pure, and sweet, and tolerably well educated, and he wanted us to lay aside our prejudices and receive her as his wife should be received. I was in favor of doing so, though perhaps this feeling was owing in part to my husband’s sensible reasoning and partly to the fact that I did not live here then and would not be obliged to come in daily contact with her. My home was in New York, and so I only heard from time to time of the doings at Beechwood. It transpired afterward that Laura’s mother was a widow, who lived much by herself, without relatives and only a few acquaintances. She had come from New Orleans the year before, and bought a house and quite a large lot of land in the suburbs of Cincinnati. There was Spanish blood in her veins, and it shows itself in Laura. The mother did some plain sewing for Arthur, who in that way saw the daughter and finally married her against her mother’s wishes. I think Mrs. Clayton was a sensible woman, or perhaps she feared that Arthur only sought her daughter’s ruin; for she tried to keep them apart, and so made the matter worse and drove them into a clandestine marriage. Mother and sister Clarissa were here then. Clarissa was never married, and from her I learned the most I know about the trouble. She deeply regretted afterward the course they pursued toward Laura, whom they did not understand, and whose life they made so wretched with their coldness and pride. She was naturally high-spirited, but she bore patiently for a long time whatever they laid upon her and tried, I believe, to please them in all things. Clarissa herself told me that the girl never really turned upon them, except as her eyes would sometimes blaze with anger, until Alice was born, and mother wanted her put out to a wet nurse, who lived so far away that for Laura to see her baby every day was impossible. Then she rebelled openly, and there was a terrible scene, but mother carried her point, as she usually did when she had Arthur where she could talk to him. Laura fought like a tigress when the last moment came, and mother took the baby from her by force, and then locked her in her room for fear she would go down to the river and drown herself, as she threatened to do.