ask his blessing as was my wont, he received me with fierce and angry
words. 'Why had I,' so he asked, 'been delighting myself in such
wanton mischief--dancing over the tender plants in the flower-beds,
all set with the famous Dutch bulbs he had brought from Holland?' I
had never been out of doors that morning, sir, and I could not
conceive what he meant, and so I said; and then he swore at me for a
liar, and said I was of no true blood, for he had seen me doing all
that mischief himself--with his own eyes. What could I say? He
would not listen to me, and even my tears seemed only to irritate
him. That day was the beginning of my great sorrows. Not long
after, he reproached me for my undue familiarity--all unbecoming a
gentlewoman--with his grooms. I had been in the stable-yard,
laughing and talking, he said. Now, sir, I am something of a coward
by nature, and I had always dreaded horses; be-sides that, my
father's servants--those whom he brought with him from foreign parts-
-were wild fellows, whom I had always avoided, and to whom I had
never spoken, except as a lady must needs from time to time speak to
her father's people. Yet my father called me by names of which I
hardly know the meaning, but my heart told me they were such as shame
any modest woman; and from that day he turned quite against me;--nay,
sir, not many weeks after that, he came in with a riding-whip in his
hand; and, accusing me harshly of evil doings, of which I knew no
more than you, sir, he was about to strike me, and I, all in
bewildering tears, was ready to take his stripes as great kindness
compared to his harder words, when suddenly he stopped his arm mid-
way, gasped and staggered, crying out, 'The curse--the curse!' I
looked up in terror. In the great mirror opposite I saw myself, and
right behind, another wicked, fearful self, so like me that my soul
seemed to quiver within me, as though not knowing to which similitude
of body it belonged. My father saw my double at the same moment,