"Or will you begin the life of a poor seamstress, working sixteen hours per day for as many pennies, and at last, take to the streets for bread?" His words cut me to the quick. I saw that there was no redemption in this world for a woman whose innocence has been sacrificed. "But think better of it, my dear. Your mother shall surround you with the most select and fashionable company in New York,--she shall give splendid parties,--you will be the presiding genius of every festival. As for myself, dropping the name of husband, I will sink into an unobtrusive visitor. When you see a little more of the world you will not think your case such a hard one after all." My face buried in my hands, I had not one word of reply. Lost,--lost,--utterly lost! CHAPTER XV. "LOST, LOST UTTERLY." My mother soon afterward gave her first party. It was attended by many of the rich and the fashionable of both sexes, and there were the glare of lights, the presence of beautiful women, and the wine-cup and the dance. The festival was prolonged till daybreak, and another followed soon. The atmosphere was new to me. At first I was amazed, then intoxicated, and then--corrupted. Anxious to bury the memory of my shame, to forget how lost and abandoned I was, to drown every thought of my childhood's home and of Ernest, who never could be mine, soon from a silent spectator I became a participant in the revels which, night after night, were held beneath my mother's roof. The persons who mingled in these scenes, were rich husbands who came accompanied by other men's wives; wives, who had sacrificed themselves in marriage, for the sake of wealth, to husbands twice their age, and these came with the husbands of other women,--in a word, all that came to the mansion and shared in its orgies, were either the victims or the criminals of society,--of a bad social world, which on every hand contrasts immense wealth and voluptuous indulgence with fathomless poverty and withering want, and which too often makes of a marriage but the cloak for infamy and prostitution. I shared in every revel, and lost myself in their maddening excitement. I was admired, flattered, and elevated at last to the position of presiding genius of these scenes. I became the "Midnight Queen." But let the curtain fall. One night I noticed a new visitor, a remarkably handsome gentleman who sat near me at the supper-table, and whose hair and eyes and whiskers were black as jet. He regarded me very earnestly and with a look which I could not define. "Don't think me impertinent," he said, and then added in a lower voice, "for I am your father, Frank. Don't call me Van Huyden--my name is Tarleton now." Fearful that I might one day encounter Ernest, I wrote him a long letter breathing something of the tone of my early days--for I forgot for awhile my utterly hopeless condition--and informing him that mother and myself were about to sail for Europe. I wished him to believe that I was in a foreign land.