The Argosy — page 329: what you’re looking at

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

313 DUKE RUTHERFORD. T was a fair’ sunny day in August. They were out on the cliffs, fathoms above the sea, at play. She a dark-eyed, wondrously beautiful girl of thirteen; he a tall, stalwart boy a year her senior. There was a wide difference in their stations in life. You had only to note the richness of her silk attire, the threadbare scantiness of his, to feel assured of that. No rich man’s son would have been dressed quite so shabbily as Duke Rutherford: and yet, in spite of the worn- out clothes, the boy, in beauty of form and feature, might have been a fit son for a nobleman. The children were gathering mosses from the rocks and chatting gaily together, forgetful of rank or station. They had met often thus for the last six years. Duke's father was the agent of the estate of Lucy Delamere’s high- bred mother. Their cottage was but a little distance from the Hall, and the children, in search of amusement, wandered out often to the cliffs, and whiled away sunny afternoons in juvenile sports. Duke gathered for his fair playfellow the brightest-tinted shells, and, in return, she brought him musty old books of romance and chivalry from the great library at the Hall, which he read and re-read, until his soul was filled with dreams and aspirations, vague, and sweet, and unreal as the visions of an opium-eater. The Rutherfords had not always been dependents. Generations back there were noblemen in the family, but political differences had taken title and wealth from the name. Early in life, Hugh Rutherford, Duke’s father, had become agent to Mr. Delamere; a post he had retained when Mr. Delamere died, leaving a widow and one only child, a girl, as sole heiress to his vast wealth and estates. Hugh Rutherford had married a young wife, beautiful and refined ; but after a few years their singularly happy life was broken. Mrs. Rutherford died, and her husband had only his six months’ old boy to toil for. No restraint was put upon the intercourse between Duke Rutherford and Lucy Delamere by the proud lady mother of the young heiress. - If she thought of the matter at all, she trusted to the inborn pride of her daughter, and to the cold contempt she had tried so faithfully to imbue her with—contempt of all that was low-born or ill-bred. Mrs. Delamere would never have thought of looking for a princely heart beneath the rough jacket of one she considered too far beneath her to merit even the tribute of a passing thought. The sea breezes gave a beautiful bloom to the cheek of Lucy’; Gnd comicbooks.com