When I was thirteen my father married again—­for my sake, and mine only.  I knew afterward that he was already foreseeing his death, and feared to leave me alone in the colony.  He thought his second wife would be a mother to me, at the age when I most needed one.  He died two years after, leaving me to her care.  He died more peacefully than he could have done, because of that.  This he said to me the very last day of his life.  Ah!  I trust the dead do not know the troubles that come to the living.  It would have troubled my father—­nay, it would have been anguish to him, even in heaven itself, if he could have seen my life after he was gone.  It is no use talking or thinking about it.  After two wretched years I was only too glad to be married, and get away from the woman who owed almost the duty of a mother to me.

Richard Foster was a nephew of my step-mother, the only man I was allowed to see.  He was almost twice my age; but he had pleasant manners, and a smooth, smooth tongue.  I believed he loved me, he swore it so often and so earnestly; and I was in sore need of love.  I wanted some one to take care of me, and think of me, and comfort me, as my father had been used to do.  So much alone, so desolate I had been since his death, no one caring whether I were happy or miserable, ill or well, that I felt grateful to Richard Foster when he said he loved me.  He seemed to come in my father’s stead, and my step-mother urged and hurried on our marriage, and I did not know what I was doing.  The trustees who had charge of my property left me to the care of my father’s widow.  That was how I came to marry him when I was only a girl of seventeen, with no knowledge of the world but what I had learned on my father’s sheep-run.

It was a horrible, shameful thing, if you will only think of it.  There was I, an ignorant, unconscious, bewildered girl, with the film of childhood over my eyes still; and there was he, a crafty, unprincipled, double-tongued adventurer, who was in love with my fortune, not with me.  As quickly as he could carry me off from my home, and return to his own haunts in Europe, he brought me away from the colony, where all whom I could ever call friends were living.  I was utterly alone with him—­at his mercy.  There was not an ear that I could whisper a complaint to; not one face that would look at me in pity and compassion.  My father had been a good man, single-hearted, high-minded, and chivalrous.  This man laughed at all honor and conscience scornfully.

I cannot tell you the shock and horror of it.  I had not known there were such places and such people in the world, until I was thrust suddenly into the midst of them; innocent at first, like the child I was, but the film soon passed away from my eyes.  I grew to loathe myself as well as him.  How would an angel feel, who was forced to go down to hell, and become like the lost creatures there, remembering all the time the undefiled heaven he was banished from?  I was no angel, but I had been a simple, unsullied, clear-minded girl, and I found myself linked in association with men and women such as frequent the gambling-places on the Continent.  For we lived upon the Continent, going from one gambling-place to another.  How was a girl like me to possess her own soul, and keep it pure, when it belonged to a man like Richard Foster?