Stella Rosevelt — page 249: what you’re looking at

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

AN INTERESTING STORY. 243 parents, fearing they would lose her also, took her abroad and traveled for many months. It was during this absence that the firm received my letter relating to her, but were unable to learn her address, as she was moving from point to point, and so could not communicate with her. ‘¢Six months after learning my fate, she met Mr. Gladstone in Paris. He fell in love with her, and offered himself to her. He was a gentleman in every sense of the word, was kind and sympathetic, and she liked him asa friend. She told him the story of her grief, and that she could never marry. He did not sneer at her ‘girlish folly,’ as many would have done, but comforted her, speaking so kindly and regretfully of me that he won even a warmer place in her heart. He was patient with her, and when at length a second time he asked her to marry him, she told him that she could never love him as she had loved me, but if he could be content to take her with what respect she could give him, and the duty she would strive to yield him, she would become his wife. He told her he would be content, and they were married—a year and three months after I sailed on the fatal voyage. ‘*’lhey traveled several months longer, and when at length on their return to London, only three or four months before I arrived there, she learned that I-had not perished, but was soon expected back, the shock nearly killed her a second time. Her Lusband was all kindness and attention, took her immediately away again, and showered everything that wealth could buy upon her; and after a time children were born to her, and those new ties aroused her to her sense of duty asa mother. I never saw_her, for 1 had not courage to look upon her dear face, knowing that she was the wife of another; for I never ceased to love her, with an affection that amounted to idolatry. They told me that she had two children--two noble boys, one of them resembling her, the other his father—that she was a comicbooks (E(0) 5