solemn promise I gave; and, despite all I have suffered, were it in my power to cancel the past I would not!  Bitter waves have broken over me, but the memory of my lover, of his devotion, is sweeter, oh! sweeter than my hopes of heaven!  God forgive me if it be sinful idolatry.  It is the one golden link that held me back, that saves me now, from selling myself to Satan.  In the midst of that rose-crowned June and July, in the height of my innocent happiness, mamma fell upon us, as a hawk swoops upon a dovecote, dividing a cooing pair.  Disguising nothing, I freely told her all, and Belmont nobly pleaded for permission to prove his worthiness.  Grandmother was a powerful ally, and perhaps the result might have been different, and mamma would have ultimately been won over, had not Erle Palma’s counsel been sought.  That cold-blooded tyrant has been the one curse of my life.  But for him, I should be to-day a happy, loving wife.  Do you wonder that I hate him?  How I have longed for the seven Apocalyptic vials of wrath!  He and mamma conferred.  An investigation concerning the Egglestons elicited the fatal fact that some branch of the family had once been accused of embezzlement, had been prosecuted by Erle Palma, and in defiance of his efforts to convict him had been acquitted.  Mamma and your guardian possessed then, as now, only one criterion: 

         ’He is .poor, and that’s suspicious; he is unknown,
          And that’s defenceless!’

Then and there they sternly prohibited even my acquaintance with one to whom I had promised all that woman can give of affection, faith, and deathless constancy.  No more pity or regard was shown to my agony of heart and mind than the cattle drover manifests in driving innocent dumb horned creatures from quiet clover meadows where they browsed in peace, to the reeking public shambles.  Even a parting interview was denied me; but clandestinely I found an opportunity to renew my vows, to assure Belmont that no power on earth should compel me to renounce him, and that if necessary I would wait twenty years for him to claim me.  Older and wiser than I, he realized what stretched before me, and while repeatedly assuring me his love was inextinguishable, he generously attempted to dissuade me from defying those who had legal control of me.  So we parted, pledged irrevocably one to the other; and whenever we have met since that summer, it has been by strategy.  My mother, from the day when the doom of my love was decreed, has been as deaf to my pleadings, and my heart-breaking cries, as the golden calf was to the indignant denunciations of Moses.  I was hurried prematurely into society, thrown into a maelstrom of gaiety that whirled me as though I were a dancing dervish, and left me apparently no leisure for retrospection or regret, or for the indulgence of the rosy dream that lay like a lovely morning cloud above and behind me.  My clothing was costly and tasteful; I was exhibited at Saratoga,