Beadle's Dime Novels No. 126: Old Jupe — page 13: what you’re looking at

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

AN INEFFECTUAL STORY. | 15 Mary’s pretty fingers were busy with making up her outfit. Luke wanted her to be as grand as possible, for they were to spend part of the winter in St. Louis. At this time the very spirit of evil took possession of An- nette. Finding herself powerléss to fascinate Luke, who con- tinued true as steel to his first preference, she went to him, asking a private interview, and told him an artful, seemingly true, but most atrocious falsehood about Mary, stating that the reason her parents had emigrated to the West, was to hide the disgrace she had brought on the family, she having been de- tected in filching goods from a store, and only escaping arrest and imprisonment because of her youth, and the sympathy felt for her father. The goods had been restored, a sum of money paid, and then Mary had been taken away from the scene of her guilt. The reason Annette gave for betraying the disgrace- ful secret to Luke, was to place him on his guard, when Mary should become his wife, and enable him to keep such # watch over her as should prevént her exercising her mania (that was what Annette called it) for taking things which were not her own. She had too much real liking for him to wish to see him dragged down and ruined by such an accident; St. Louis would be a great field of temptation to Mary, who had been a pilferer from a child. In conclusion, she begged him not to let her parents know that she had fore-armed him, as it would _ almost kill them. All this was done so artfully, with such appearance of distress at the necessity for making the revela- tion, that Luke Bryant might almost have been pardoned had the poison had its intended effect. He listened in silence un- til the girl was through; then he turned upon her with a re- buke so Withering, a dislike so positive, that she quailed before it, and shrunk into the guilty creature she was. Although he did not allude to it, Annette knew that Luke read the secret of her love for him, and that she had laid a snare to catch him, through the ruin of her sister’s happiness ; she knew that she had lost his respect, had inspired his distrust and dislike, and bad not injured Mary in the least, From that hour, all the strength of her passionate, ill-regu- lated mind was turned into hate for both. This young couple, so admired and loved by others, was hated by her with a fierce energy born of unrequited love, humbled pride, anger, connicloooks.com