This part of my story is best told in few words.  I had not been at home one week before I found that rumor had been for some months coupling John Gray’s name with the name of Mrs. Emma Long, a widow who had but just returned to——­, after twelve years of married life in Cuba.  John had known her in her girlhood, but there had never been any intimacy or even friendship between them.  My sister, however, had known her well, had corresponded with her during all her life at the South, and had invited her to her house immediately upon her return to——.  Emma Long was a singularly fascinating woman.  Plain and sharp and self-asserting at twenty-two, she had become at thirty-five magnetic and winning, full of tact, and almost beautiful.  We see such surprising developments continually:  it seems as if nature did her best to give every woman one period of triumph and conquest; perhaps only they know its full sweetness to whom it comes late.  In early youth it is accepted unthinkingly, as is the sunshine,—­enjoyed without deliberation, and only weighed at its fullness when it is over.  But a woman who begins at thirty to feel for the first time what it is to have power over men, must be more or less than woman not to find the knowledge and the consciousness dangerously sweet.

I never knew—­I do not know to-day, whether Emma Long could be justly called a coquette.  That she keenly enjoyed the admiration of men, there was no doubt.  Whether she ever were conscious of even a possible harm to them from their relation to her, there was always doubt, even in the minds of her bitterest enemies.  I myself have never doubted that in the affair between her and John Gray she was the one who suffered most; she was the one who had a true, deep sentiment, and not only never meant a wrong, but would have shrunk, for his sake, if not for her own, from the dangers which she did not foresee, but which were inevitable in their intimacy.  I think that her whole life afterward proved this.  I think that even my sister believed it.

Mrs. Long had spent six weeks in my sister’s house, and had then established herself in a very beautiful furnished house on the same street.  Almost every day Mrs. Long’s carriage was at my sister’s door, to take my sister or the children to drive.  Almost every evening Mrs. Long came with the easy familiarity of an habituated guest in the house, to sit in my sister’s parlor, or sent with the easy familiarity of an old friend for my sister and her husband to come to her, or to go with her to the theatre or to the opera.

What could be more natural?—­what could be more delightful, had the relation been one which centred around my sister instead of around my sister’s husband?  What could be done, what offense could be taken, what obstacle interposed, so long as the relation appeared to be one which included the whole family?  Yet no human being could see John Gray five minutes in Emma Long’s presence without observing that his eyes, his words, his consciousness were hers.  And no one could observe her in his presence without seeing that she was kindled, stimulated, as she was in no other companionship.