keep up by the active stimulus of opposition an interest that she had
begun to think if left to itself might wane. She was conscious that
her cousin Julia, although impertinent and illogical, was right in
considering her first epistolary advances to Corbin as a youthful
convert's religious zeal. But now that her girlish enthusiasm was spent,
and the revival itself had proved as fleeting an excitement as the old
"Tournament of Love and Beauty," which it had supplanted, she preferred
to believe that she enjoyed the fascinating impropriety because it was
the actual result of her religious freedom. Perhaps she had a vague idea
that Corbin's conversion would expiate her present preference for dress
and dancing. She had certainly never flirted with him; they had never
exchanged photographs; there was not a passage in his letters that might
not have been perused by her parents,--which, I fear, was probably one
reason why she had never shown her correspondence; and beyond the fact
that this letter-writing gave her a certain importance in her own
eyes and those of her companions, it might really be stopped. She even
thought of writing at once to him that her parents objected to its
further continuance, but remembering that his usual monthly letter was
now nearly due, she concluded to wait until it came.

It is to be feared that Miss Sally had little help in the way of family
advice, and that the moral administration of the Dows household was as
prematurely developed and as precociously exhausted as the estate and
mansion themselves. Captain Dows' marriage with Josephine Jeffcourt,
the daughter of a "poor white," had been considered a mesalliance by his
family, and his own sister, Miranda Dows, had abandoned her brother's
roof and refused to associate with the Jeffcourts, only returning to
the house and an armed neutrality at the death of Mrs. Dows a few years
later. She had taken charge of Miss Sally, sending her to school at
Nashville until she was recalled by her father two years ago. It may be