Leah lifted the glossy dark hair from her smooth pale forehead, and displayed the long, hard scar, that was so carefully concealed by the ebon folds.  “I always wear my hair combed to hide it.”

“Oh!  Leah, Leah,” sighed Lizzie, “how dreadful!”

“At sight of the blood that flowed freely from the wound, my father caught me in his arms, and kissing my blood-stained face, exclaimed again and again: 

“’Fool, wretch, devil, that I am!  Not for all the world would I have shed a drop of this precious blood.  I beg your forgiveness, my darling—­a thousand times, my child!’ My cries, though suppressed, brought my mother to the room.  With a well-assumed air of innocence and tenderness, she sought to wipe away the blood from my face, and bind up the gash upon my forehead.  I all the while abstractedly wondering if I really did break the pipe; such was my weakness, such the power that was over and around my young life, and is yet, even to this very hour.

“My father gathered up the scattered fragments of the broken treasure and cast them into the fire; and from that day to this, he has never alluded in any manner to that occurrence.  Always kind and tender to me, he seems to be ever endeavoring to atone for some wrong, and his long-continued silence assures me how vividly and regretfully he remembers his violence toward me.”

“Shocking!” ejaculated Lizzie with emotion.

“Yes, it is shocking, dear Lizzie; for the horrible truth is ever before me, and this hated scar is the seal of the first lie of my tender young life.  I never comb my hair away from my face, so morbidly am I impressed with the fear that those who see it will read the cause of its existence.  Oh!  Lizzie, that falsehood, and that cruel deception imposed upon a helpless child, were terrible indeed, too terrible to be borne.

“But I must proceed.  I have dwelt thus minutely upon this first unhappy incident of my childhood, because it is a sort of guide-post to a long and dreary waste of years.  It forms the headstone of my departed freedom, for, as I have said, in that evil moment when I yielded to her wicked, imperious will, I lost all moral power, and to this day, am worse than her vassal.  Try as I may, I cannot shake off the habit; it has become second nature, and her influence now is so withering that I dare not make resistance; and yet, I despise myself for my weakness.  Pity me, Lizzie, do not blame me!  There’s a moral want about me somewhere, Heaven knows, that no human agency can supply.

“My mother’s assumed fondness for me led my father to believe that she loved me truly, and was tender and kind as she should be.  He never dreamed of her deception.  And to this day, he knows nothing of it, for I have never told him any of my trials and sorrows, since the day he struck me that undeserved blow.  I love my father tenderly, and yet I cannot, dare not, unfold to his blinded vision the facts that have so long been concealed from him.  No, Lizzie, I would rather suffer on as I must do, than darken his life by such a discovery.