Slighted love: or, At her heart's expense

Winthrop-by-the-Sea, a brilliant, dusky-eyed, foreign-looking girl, like some rare-plumaged, tropical bird alighted on an alien shore. She was young, she was maddeningly lovely, this girl, and but a few months before she had knelt beneath the blossoming limes in an old Italian garden, and looking up with dark, pathetic eyes into the pale, fair face above her, had murmured anxiously: “Mama, why do we lead so lonely a life? Why do people seem to shun us? What have we done?” The mother’s soft blue eyes had filled with tears as she faltered: “So you have seen it, my darling? I can no longer hide from you our desolation.” “No, mama, for now I am seventeen years old, and can reason quite like a woman. I have seen what I have told you—that we two are alone in the world together, friendless and seemingly shunned. We rove from clime to clime like two restless ghosts, yet everywhere some dark shadow of destiny follows us. We seem to be known and remarked even in places that are strange to us. As for you, I comprehend that you are bitterly unhappy, for I have never seen a smile upon your lips. Mama, why is it so? Why are we branded and set apart from the rest of the world?” The blue-eyed mother sobbed bitterly: “The moment I have dreaded so long has come at last. I must confess the truth to my child. God grant her strength to bear the cross.” She kissed the eager, upturned face, and her tears fell on its wondrous beauty. “Oh, my love, my love, how cruel Fate has been to us!” she cried. “I might have been so happy, and you might have reigned like a little queen, but, alas, alas! one dark moment of horror changed both our lives—turned sunshine to darkness, happiness to despair.” The girl’s white arms, that were a very poem of beauty, encircled the drooping form, the red lips kissed the tears away, and the sweet voice murmured tenderly: “And you have not deserved that the winds of Fate should blow roughly upon you, my dearest one.” “God bless you for those loving words, my child. Oh, what a treasure is your faith and love! May they not fail me when you learn of the shadow that has darkened your life and mine,” sighed Mrs. Vale, and, after a moment, she added…