Our unhappy history is so widely known that there is no harm in telling you that my mother and he were separated during many years, and when mamma died three years ago she left all her money to me, absolutely under my control.

I was young, only seventeen, but I managed to retain it, though goodness only knows how, and this horrid Hungarian prince wants it--to help him to regain a throne, he says--but I don't believe him." "You could not be forced into matrimony," said Curtis, with a slow gravity that was lost on his dejected hearer.
"You cannot have lived in France, or you would not say that," was the bitter answer.

"Everyone, everything, was opposed to me.

I was a minor, and one against many.

The laws seemed to conspire with my relatives to force me into the power of a beast.