Then I offered to perform my operation upon Josephine herself, to the end that she also might enjoy a restored youth: which offer Josephine haughtily declined.
“It is very fortunate,” she added, “that this alteration in her appearance has taken place, for now it will be impossible for anybody who may have known her in former days to identify her: a danger which otherwise we should have had to fear.”
“Yes,” I acquiesced, “that is very true.”
The disposition which our visitor developed, furthermore, better than answered to our most sanguine anticipations. Her new environment vivified the best of those propensities which heredity had implanted in her, and left dormant those that were for evil. Her quality was so sweet and winning, that in a little while she had taken our old hearts captive, and become the delight and the treasure of our home. We loved her like a daughter; and the notion that we might some time have to part with her was intolerable. Therefore, we put our heads together, and entered into a pious conspiracy, agreeing to represent to her that she was our niece, the child of our brother, an orphan, eighteen years old, by name Miriam, who, on the 14th day of June, 1884, had sustained an accident which had destroyed her recollection of the past. As our niece, recently arrived from England, we introduced her to our friends. She reciprocated our affection in the tenderest manner, called us aunt and uncle, and was in every respect a blessing to our lives—so beautiful, so gentle, so merry, so devoted.
This mysterious and impressive circumstance I must not for one moment allow to be lost sight of:—That, of all living human beings, she who least suspected that such a woman as Louise Massarte had ever lived, sinned, suffered, was Miriam Benary. She upon whom Louise Massarte's life, sins, and sufferings had least effect or influence, was Miriam Benary. Her identity was in every respect as separate, and as distinct from that of Louise Massarte, as mine is from my reader's. Louise Massarte was dead, dead utterly. Into her tenement of clay a new soul had entered It was a fearful and wonderful metamorphosis, rich in suggestiveness; a datum, it seems to me, bearing importantly upon three sciences: Psychology, Divinity, and Ethics.
Thus nearly four years elapsed, and it was Monday, the 12th day of March, 1888, the day of the memorable snowstorm, called the Blizzard.