"I shudder at the fatality that seems to haunt your footsteps, and throws a shadow of crime about your path, you being guiltless." "There was such a fatality," said Miriam; "yes; the shadow fell upon me, innocent, but I went astray in it, and wandered--as Hilda could tell you--into crime." She went on to say that, while yet a child, she had lost her English mother.

From a very early period of her life, there had been a contract of betrothal between herself and a certain marchese, the representative of another branch of her paternal house,--a family arrangement between two persons of disproportioned ages, and in which feeling went for nothing.

Most Italian girls of noble rank would have yielded themselves to such a marriage as an affair of course.

But there was something in Miriam's blood, in her mixed race, in her recollections of her mother,--some characteristic, finally, in her own nature,--which had given her freedom of thought, and force of will, and made this prearranged connection odious to her.

Moreover, the character of her destined husband would have been a sufficient and insuperable objection; for it betrayed traits so evil, so treacherous, so vile, and yet so strangely subtle, as could only be accounted for by the insanity which often develops itself in old, close-kept races of men, when long unmixed with newer blood.