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"'Fore Gad!" thought he, "I suppose I must take the heiress after all; the sooner 't is over, the sooner I can get back to Brook Street." "It is premature, my fair cousin," said he, aloud, "premature, after less than a week's visit, and only some fourteen or fifteen hours' permitted friendship and intimacy, to say what is uppermost in my thoughts; but we spendthrifts are provokingly handsome!
Added to these attractions, there was an intense magnetic power in the gaze of his dark eyes, and in the tone of his deep voice, a power that few could resist, and certainly not Sybil Berners. But who and what besides heiress and beauty was Sybil Berners? To tell you all she was. I must first tell you something about her family, the "Berners of Black Hall."
They were seeking acquaintance with wealthy Bombay families. Both had been invited to a social function at the home of a prominent man. "Uncle Thomas said: "'Alice, the money Paul is spending rightfully belongs to you. This red-handed wretch will try to marry some aristocratic heiress. How fine to snare him into a trap!
Even so he would be twenty years his wife's senior, and he had chosen to marry one of the Brookes girls because he knew them and saw them constantly; because he knew that at their father's death his fortune would be divided between them. Grace was, therefore, an heiress in perspective.
Nor did he add that there were but two contingencies which he felt might thwart his plans: her marriage to Wilmot Allen, or his own untimely death. And he feared the latter but little. The former, however, had at times seemed imminent to those who spied upon the daily life of the heiress for him, and in lending money to Wilmot he was taking a first step toward making it impossible.
"Aunt Emma," I said plainly, in a decided voice, "I'm a full-grown woman, over twenty-one years of age, mistress of my own acts, and no longer a ward of yours. I can do as I like, and neither Dr. Wade nor anybody else can prevent me. He may ADVICE me not to go: he has no power to ORDER me. I'm my father's heiress, and a person of independent means. I've been a cipher too long.
Vincent took after his English father rather than his Virginia mother, both in appearance and character, and was likely to become as tall and brawny a man as the former had been when he first won the love of the Virginia heiress. He was full of life and energy, and in this respect offered a strong contrast to most of his schoolfellows of the same age.
Beauty, though it beams over the organization of a doll, will have its hour of empire; the most torpid heiress will easily get herself married; but the wife whose sweet nature can kindle worthy delights is she that brings to her hearth a joyous, hopeful, ardent spirit, and that subtle power whose sources we can hardly trace, but which yet so irradiates a home that all who come near are filled and inspired by a deep sense of womanly presence.
Fully grown up, big and tall, but ugly like her mother, with the same little eyes and disproportionate breadth of the lower part of the face, lying with her hair in disorder, muffled up to the chin, she made upon Korolyov at the first minute the impression of a poor, destitute creature, sheltered and cared for here out of charity, and he could hardly believe that this was the heiress of the five huge buildings.
Fate has brought the gentle Louise Moreau to the very threshold of her old home. It is Providence. Destiny. The all-knowing Pere Francois reveals to her how strangely the life-path of the heiress has been guarded. "My daughter," the priest solemnly says, "be comforted. Right shall prevail. Trust me, trust Colonel Woods. Your child may fall heir yet to a name and to her own inheritance.
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