“Father Burton died and was laid with his fathers, and Esther and Lisette wept together in their sorrow, and arrayed themselves sadly in mourning weeds. The suspicions of their neighbors never troubled them. The thought that their step-mother could be to utterly depraved would have killed them at once, had it entered their minds. The father had not, however, been long gone to rest when they perceived a change in the mother and son. The mother’s face assumed a crafty and hag-like expression, and the son’s face seemed to have gotten a look of stupid cunning quite foreign to it. Except this, for some time, nothing was to be seen; but soon matters took a more overt and decided turn, Andrew again renewed his odious attentions, but with a confidence which he formerly lacked. He was met with the same coldness as before, to which was added an entreaty—coached in the most conciliatory language, to the effect—that he would desist. But coldness and entreaty were alike vain. He still persisted, and Dame Burton, at last, seconded his suit by commanding Lisette, in unequivocal terms, to marry him.
“‘I cannot! I will not!’ said Lisette, with a passionate burst of tears, at the close of an interview in which the matter had been pressed upon her with more than ordinary vehemence and fiendish show of malignity.
“‘Cannot? will not?’ muttered the dame, half to herself and half to her auditor, accompanying the same with an impatient gesture, and a laugh hissed through her closed teeth—‘we will see! we will see!’
“‘I beg to hear no more of this,’ continued the persecuted girl, ‘or I shall expect our poor dead father to come in his shroud to defend me from such cruelty.’
“‘Thy poor dead father in his shroud!’ echoed the step-mother. ‘Ah, ha! it was a good drug—a friendly drug,’ she muttered on in an undertone, ‘a pleasant potion, for a peevish child!’ and then she laughed at her devilish wit. ‘Thy father sleeps well, child. Did thy keen wit ever take exception at the friendly nursing which waited on him to the grave?’
“Lisette started, and looked fearfully at her; but, recovering herself, she proceeded to state her refusal more definitely.
“‘I will took upon thy son as a brother, but do not think I can ever do more. Why will he persist in asking what he has so often been told I cannot give? We are dissimilar, and I cannot love him—but I do not hate him. I repeat, I will continue to regard him as a brother, but in any other light I cannot—ay, I will not—look upon him!’
“Rising with the last words she would have passed from the room, but she was detained.
“‘Dost love another?’ queried the crone, looking her full in the face.
“The blood rushed to the young girl’s cheeks.