When the sunshine fell upon her golden locks in the early days of innocence, it was in a home where the ringing laugh, the merry shout, and the wild exuberance of feeling ever bursting from the heart of childhood were rarely checked; or, if repressed, with a hand that wounded not in its firm contraction.

She had grown up to womanhood amid all that was gentle, kind and loving.

Transplanted, then, like a tender flower from a sunny border, to the cold and formal home of her husband, she drooped in the uncongenial soil, down into which her heart-fibres penetrated in search of nutrition.

And yet, while drooping thus, she tenderly loved her husband, and earnestly sought to overcome in herself many true impulses of nature to which he gave the false name of weaknesses.

It was less painful thus to repress them herself, than to have them crushed in the iron hand with which he was ever ready to grasp them.
Let it not be thought that Andrew Howland was an evil minded man.