“Ah!” muttered Edgerton, “you little know, my worthy squire, with whom you are dealing. I shall study this game pretty thoroughly. Your instinct is finer than your honor, you fool, for you did not like to trust me; but you were in rather a tight place, and I warn you to look to it, that some day you are not in a tighter one.”
CHAPTER IX.
CONFIDENCE.
Six years!
How much significance those two short words contain! To how many souls they have brought joy and sorrow, weal and woe—some lifted to the highest pinnacle of happiness, while others are driven to the deepest depths of despair!
Hearts so gay and happy six years ago, now crushed with their weight of trials and cares. Bright eyes have wept away their luster over hopes that were born but to wither and die. The cankerous worm, sorrow, gnawing at once happy hearts, has robbed the once rounded cheek of its bloom and beauty, leaving in their place deep lines of pain and suffering which time can never remove.
Sorrow! sorrow! The earth is full of sorrow! Yet a happy few there are who move on in the even tenor of their way, growing each year more beautiful and lovely, making the world glad, bright, and gay, dispensing sunshine and joy along the pathway of their lives, giving and receiving a full measure of earth’s choicest blessings—love, joy, happiness!
We will have nothing to do, dear reader, with life’s shady side just now. Our lines are cast in more pleasant places, and we will enter for a while the charmed circle of the careless and free.
Madame Alroyd’s elegant up-town mansion was all one glittering blaze of light and beauty.
Every pane of glass in the high and lofty windows was like a star, and every door-way and arch a constellation of stars; while every room and hall was a floral temple, filling the air around with the richest perfume.
Guests, young, gay, and lovely, clad in their richest and most becoming robes, throng this modern palace to pay their compliments, congratulations, and adieus to its fair young mistress and heiress, who on the morrow is to leave her native land to travel among scenes new and strange in the olden world.