“My life might have gone on for long years more in just that dreary fashion, had not a singular event happened. A lawyer—your parent’s friend, Lawyer Abbot, suddenly appeared at the plantation one day, and asked for the housekeeper of Blackheath Hall. I overheard the conversation between them, and his mission there, which was to tell her that the master of Blackheath Hall had just died abroad, and to inform her as to the conditions of his will, which was, that the girl Jess (meaning me) who was then on the plantation, and who had made it her home there, for many years, was to receive half of his entire fortune, providing she married, within the ensuing twelve months, his heir, and nephew, John Dinsmore.
“To cut a long story short, Queenie, this John Dinsmore soon came down to Blackheath Hall for the purpose of ‘looking me over,’ as he wrote the housekeeper that he would do. From the first moment we met, I took a most terrible dislike to him, although he was the greatest dandy imaginable.
“There was something about him which seemed to warn me not to trust him, and to fly from him—I cannot explain what it was. As was expected of him, he asked me to marry him; and by dint of persuasion from the housekeeper, I, at length, reluctantly consented, although every throb of my heart seemed to speak and tell me that if I married him I would rue it—rue it—rue it! I felt so terribly about it that it seemed to me I must get away amidst new scenes to get up courage to take the fatal plunge into the turbulent sea of matrimony.
“For a wonder, Mrs. Bryson, the old housekeeper of Blackheath Hall, did not oppose my strange notion, as she termed it; instead, she consulted with Lawyer Abbot, and the result was that they concluded to send me to visit you in New York.”
At this point in her narrative Jess stopped confusedly, turning from red to white, her heart throbbing so tumultuously that Queenie could not help hearing it.
“Go on, my dear,” she said, sweetly. “You cannot tell how interested I am; it is better than reading a love story from a novel.”
“You would think so if you knew what happened next,” thought Jess, but she dared not put that thought into speech. She said, instead:
“As you may have heard, my visit to you was intercepted on the very morning I was to take the train in company with Lawyer Abbot, for New York, by a telegram informing us that you were away, and would not return for a few weeks.
“My disappointment was so keen that, to assuage my great grief and dry my tears, Lawyer Abbot proposed that I should go somewhere, now that I was all ready to go, and proposed sending me to a relative of his, on a farm.
“I hailed this eagerly—anything to get away from Blackheath Hall. Well, I was kindly received by the good farmer, and his wife and daughter, and there I spent the happiest days that I had ever known. I was loath to tear myself away from the place even when I received a letter from Lawyer Abbot, stating that you were now at home, in New York, and that he was coming to conduct me there at once. Ah, Queenie, when I left that farm, I left all the happiness that I had ever known behind me. I wrote to the man to whom I had betrothed myself that I wished to break the engagement; that it was impossible to ever marry him now, for I found that we were as wide apart as though we had never met, and that I had never had any love for him, and that he was to consider the matter irrevocably settled.