Mrs.Stanford placed her first-born back in the crib, and sat down to her solitary dinner.

She ate very little.
The lodging-house soups and roasts had never been so distasteful before.
She pushed the things away, with a feeling of loathing, and went back to her low chair, and fell into a train of dismal misery.

Her thoughts went back to Canada to her happy home at Danton Hall.
Only one little year ago she had given the world for love, and thought it well lost--and now! Love's young dream, splendid in theory, is not always quite so splendid in practice.

Love's young dream had wound up after eleven months, in poverty, privation, sickness and trouble, a neglectful husband, and a crying baby! How happy she had been in that bright girlhood, gone forever! Life had been one long summer holiday, and she dressed in silks and jewels, one of the queen-bees in the great human hive.

The silks and the jewels had gone to the pawnbroker long ago, and here she sat, alone, in a miserable lodging-house, subsisting on unpalatable food, sleeping on a hard mattress, sick and wretched, with that whimpering infant's wails in her ears all day and all night.
Oh! how long ago it seemed since she had been bright, and beautiful, and happy, and free--hundreds of years ago at the very least! She sighed in bitter sorrow, as she thought of the past--the irredeemable past.
"Oh, what a fool I was!" she thought, bursting into hysterical tears.
"If I had only married Jules La Touche, how happy I might have been! He loved me, poor fellow, and would have been true always, and I would have been rich, and happy, and honoured.