only thing that had impressed itself distinctly upon her memory, through
the chicanery of chances, was that once in a cathedral-choir she had
seen the handsome, blonde-hued, Vandyck face of a gentleman with
dreaming eyes looking at her from a gallery-niche with the most singular
earnestness. So at sixteen she found that the nuns had exhausted their
slender lore, and had nothing more to teach her; and after her brief
travels, she returned home for a finality, and there had dallied a
twelvemonth, lapped in the Elysium of freedom and youth. Every want
anticipated, every whim gratified, servants prostrate before her, father
adoring her,--the year sped on wings of silent joy, and left her a shade
more imperious than it met her. Launched into society, wealthy and
winning, Éloise counted, too, her lovers; but she spurned them so gayly
that her hard heart became a proverb through all the region round,
wherever the rejected travelled. It is true that Mr. Erne had often
expressed his film of dissatisfaction with the conventual results, and
had planned an attack on matters of more solid learning; but, tricksy as
a sprite, Éloise had escaped his designs, broken through his
regulations, implored, just out of shackles, a year's gambol in liberty,
and had made herself too charming to be resisted in her plea; and if,
feeling his health fail, he had at first insisted,--in the fear that
there might be left but brief opportunity for him to make her pleasure,
he yielded. Nevertheless, with the best outlay in the world,
plantation-life is not all a gala, and there were, it must be confessed,
certain ennuisome moments in which Éloise made inroads on her father's
library, chiefly in wild out-of-the-way veins, all which, however,
romantic, unsystematic, and undigested, did nothing towards rendering
her one whit more independent of the world in time of future trial.

One afternoon, just reëntering the house from some gay farewell of
friends, she found her father sitting in the hall, and she stood