might come, if she would put up with their country fare.

"She came the next week. She was a widow, some thirty years old, ten
years older than I was. I did not think her pretty,--perhaps
_piquante_, but that was all. In my first fastidiousness, I
thought her hardly lady-like, and laughed at her evident attempts to
attract my notice,--at her little vanities and affectations. But I do
not know; we were always together; I saw no other woman but the
farmer's wife. There were the mountain walks, the trees, the flowers,
the moonlight; she talked so well upon them all! In short, you do not
know, no young girl can know, the influence which a woman in middle
life, if she has anything in her, has over a young man; and she,--she
had shrewdness and a certain talent, and, I think now, knew what she
was doing,--at any rate, I fell madly in love. I knew my father would
never consent to my marrying then; I knew I was ruining my prospects
by doing so; but that very knowledge only made me more eager to secure
her.

"She was entirely independent of control, being left a widow with some
little property, and threw no obstacles in my way. We were married
there, in that little village, and for a few weeks I lived in a fool's
paradise.

"I could not tell you--indeed, I would not tell you, if I could--how
by degrees I found out what I had done,--that I had flung away my
heart on a woman who married me simply to secure herself the position
in society which her own imprudence had lost; how, when she found I
had nothing to offer her but a home in my father's house, entirely
dependent upon him, she accused me of having deceived her for the sake
of her own miserable pittance; how she made herself the common talk of