going to the carriage waiting at the door.  Never in her girlish days had she been so beautiful as she was now, but Richard seldom told her so, though he felt the magic influence of her brilliant beauty, and did not wonder that she was the reigning belle.  He seldom accompanied her himself.  Parties, and receptions, and concerts, were bores, he said; and at first he had raised objections to her going without him.  But after motherly Mrs. Harris, who boarded in the next block, and was never happier than when chaperoning someone, offered to see to her and take her under the same wing which had sheltered six fine and now well-married daughters, Richard made no further objections.  He did not wish to be thought a domestic tyrant; he did not wish to seem jealous, and so he would wrap Ethie’s cloak around her, and taking her himself to Mrs. Harris’ carriage, would give that lady sundry charges concerning her, bidding her see that she did not dance till wholly wearied out, and asking her to bring her home earlier than the previous night.  Then, returning to his solitary rooms, he would sit nursing the demon which might so easily have been thrust aside.  Ethie was not insensible to his kindness in allowing her to follow the bent of her own inclinations, even when it was so contrary to his own, and for his sake she did many things she might not otherwise have done.  She snubbed Harry Clifford and the whole set of dandies like him, so that, though they danced, and talked, and laughed with her, they never crossed a certain line of propriety which she had drawn between them.  She was very circumspect; she tried at first in various ways to atone to Richard for her long absence from him, telling him whatever she thought would interest him, and sometimes, when she found him waiting for her, and looking so tired and sleepy, playfully chiding him for sitting up for her, and telling him that though it was kind in him to do so, she preferred that he should not.  This was early in the season; but after the day when Mrs. Markham, senior, came over from Olney to spend the day, and “blow Richard’s wife up,” as she expressed it, everything was changed, and Ethelyn stayed out as late as she liked without any concessions to Richard.  Mrs. Markham, senior, had heard strange stories of Ethelyn’s proceedings—­“going to parties night after night, with her dress shamefully low, and going to plays and concerts bareheaded, with flowers and streamers in her hair, besides wearing a mask, and pretending she was Queen Hortense.”

“A pretty critter to be,” Mrs. Markham had said to the kind neighbor who had returned from Camden and was giving her the particulars in full of Ethelyn’s misdoings.  “Yes, a pretty critter to be!  If I was goin’ to turn myself into somebody else I’d take a decent woman.  I wonder at Richard’s lettin’ her; but, law! he is so blind and she so headstrong!”

And the good woman groaned over this proof of depravity as she questioned her visitor further with regard to Ethie’s departures from duty.