A Final Triumph; or, A Lady Bachelor — page 92: what you’re looking at

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

90 A LADY BACHELOR. _ CHAPTER IX. PENALTIES. ELoise STUDEVANT was the younger of the two lady passengers who arrived at the hotel that summer after- noon, as 1 have told. She was the young lady who had taken a momentary social prominence, and who had been relegated to isolation when her crime was exposed. I have told the story of her crime. ‘This fair creature had dared to be faithful to the one love that had risen in her heart. She had dared to live in the memory of past hopes, blighted though they were, rather than bury her experi- ence and build an artificial love over the ruins of a real one. Her sincerity and loyalty compelled her to accept the penalty. I learned the story of the crime from the elder lady, who was a maternal aunt. She was a noble woman, and my isolation, because of my physical deformities, appeared to arouse her sympathies. Several times she spoke kindly to me, and then I flatter myself that she discerned that within my crippled form was concealed a penetrating intellect and a sympathetic heart; and later a little incident of which I was a witness won from her an explanation, and she told me in detail the story. From her 1 take up the narration, and present the pen- alties a lovely, warm-hearted young lady encountered, simply because, for almost tragic reasons, she resolved to become a lady bachelor, and I adopt the appellation of GEomichooks (E(0)