give in return. Oh, that I may one day be able to serve you!"

At the moment she perceived Mañuel Nevarro crossing the Plaza, and
drawing closer the mantilla, she hastened homeward.




CHAPTER IX.

"A perfect woman, nobly planned;
To warn, to counsel, to command,
The reason firm, the temperate will,
Prudence, foresight, strength, and skill."

WORDSWORTH.


The beautiful ideal of Wordsworth seemed realized in Mrs. Carlton. She
was by nature impetuous, and even irritable; but the careful training
of her deeply pious mother early eradicated these seeds of discord and
future misery. She reared her "in the way she should go," and taught
her to "remember her Creator in the days of her youth." Crushing
vanity, which soon rose hydra-headed in her path, she implanted in her
daughter's heart a sense of her own unworthiness, and led her to the
"fountain of light and strength."

Under her judicious care, Ellen's character was molded into perfect
beauty. She became a Christian, in the purest sense of the term. Hers
were not the gloomy tenets of the anchorite, which, with a sort of