Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. WHEN HALF-GODS GO. When Bernard Garner brought home his second wife,— the only child of his old friend Ailing-, ton Pierpont of Virginia,— Constance was a girl of thirteen, and her mother had been dead ten years. Her two sisters were already married, her brothers were at college, and henceforward this sweet, bright young step-mother made the first interest in her life, drew from her, ardor, devotion, loyalty, — a longing for self-sacrifice, a feeling that she must not only love but guard. For Constance divined by instinct, although she had never quite formulated her idea, that Kathleen's strong point was not logic or discrimination. Kathy herself confessed it. " But then," she would explain, " I was not braced up by discipline; I was not really educated. We could not afford it, and papa always said that a born lady was endowed by Heaven with whatever she ought to know, and that he considered it a risk to interfere with the intentions of a wise Providence. Then Mr. Garner always told me he was glad I was not learned, that it was enough for a woman to know how to spell, and that two and two make four. I confess I never couldunderstand clearly that two and two do make four, but, you see, I was brought up on fairy stories and the Arabian Nights, and have always expected odd, delightful, and surprising things to happen." It had been one of these unexpected events when she was snatched from her decaying Virginian home to preside over Bernard Garner's house in New York. Mr. Garner was fond of his young wife, but he was an active man, engrossed in business and politics, and was obliged to content himself with giving her all the money she could spend, and leaving her and Constance to take care of each other. He lived but a few years after this marriage, dying with awf...