He had never bullied her, had never seemed to scorn her; and then he was so beautiful! She, poor girl, bewildered among various suitors, utterly confused by the life to which she was introduced, troubled by fitful attacks of admonition from her father, who would again, fitfully, leave her unnoticed for a week at a time; with no trust in her pseudo-mother--for poor Marie, had in truth been born before her father had been a married man, and had never known what was her own mother's fate,--with no enjoyment in her present life, had come solely to this conclusion, that it would be well for her to be taken away somewhere by somebody.

Many a varied phase of life had already come in her way.

She could just remember the dirty street in the German portion of New York in which she had been born and had lived for the first four years of her life, and could remember too the poor, hardly-treated woman who had been her mother.
She could remember being at sea, and her sickness,--but could not quite remember whether that woman had been with her.

Then she had run about the streets of Hamburg, and had sometimes been very hungry, sometimes in rags,--and she had a dim memory of some trouble into which her father had fallen, and that he was away from her for a time.

She had up to the present splendid moment her own convictions about that absence, but she had never mentioned them to a human being.