A Heart's Bitterness — page 96: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

38 A HEART'S BITTERNESS. She had heard of the marvelous, and to her, fatal beauty of the rector’s daughter; and now they would be set face to face. During the first few days after the return, Lord Leigh es- corted the bride over all his estates. On horseback or in the landau, they- viewed farms, villages, dower houses, mill properties, churches, school-houses, cottages, moor- lands, running streams, great corn-lands. Everywhere, at leafy lane or rosy covert, or daisy-strewn dell, or village street, Violet looked forthe fair woman whom she feared, and found her not. Not thus was Norman Leigh to meet her who only had roused in his selfish heart some semblance of true love. But one summer evening, on the verge of his estates, beyond the deer park, as he lounged idly along alone, he _ saw the sunset falling between the beach stems and illumi- nating a slender shape in white, a faee heavenly fair up- lifted as she listened to a bird’s vespers; the glory of her hair falling like a golden shower over her shoulders, lips parted, and white hands raised as a sibyl’s, her little foot poised on the velvet sod, seeming hardly of this earth earthy, and, alas, to his utter ruin, his whole soul went forth to worship at her altar. | CHAPTER XXIII. ‘““T WILL NOT HAVE HER UNDER MY ROOF.” When, two years before, Norman had first met Edna Ambrose, and for a year had followed her as a lover, his heart had been distracted by the passion for play, and the terrible and dangerous position in which it had brought him. His own jeopardy had hindered his tasting love with more than half his mind. But now, through Violet’s for- tune, he was freed from all debts and embarrassments; he was, for the time being, satiated with his play at Homburg, and removed from temptations to gambling in the security of Leigh ‘Towers; and that disastrous craving for excite- ment, usually centered on the green table, now leaped forth in the direction of a renewed and intensified passion for Miss Ambrose. <3 dn the year since he had seen her, Miss Ambrose had Eomicbooks (E(0)