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                       A CHANGED HEART

                          A Novel.

                    BY MAY AGNES FLEMING,

    AUTHOR OF "GUY EARLSCOURT'S WIFE," "A TERRIBLE SECRET," "A WONDERFUL
    WOMAN," "ONE NIGHT'S MYSTERY," "SILENT AND TRUE," "A MAD MARRIAGE,"
    "LOST FOR A WOMAN," ETC., ETC.


    "If Fortune, with a smiling face,
     Strew roses on our way,
    When shall we stoop to pick them up?
     To-day, my love, to-day."


    NEW YORK:
    Copyright, 1881, by
    _G. W. Carleton & Co., Publishers_,
    LONDON: S. LOW, SON & CO.
    MDCCCLXXXIII.

    Stereotyped by
    SAMUEL STODDER,
    ELECTROTYPER & STEREOTYPER,
    90 ANN STREET, N. Y.


    TROW
    PRINTING AND BOOK-BINDING CO.
    N. Y.




CONTENTS.


    CHAPTER                                                       PAGE

        I. Miss McGregor at home                                     7

       II. Nathalie                                                 14

      III. Miss Rose                                                25

       IV. Val's office                                             36

        V. Killing two birds with one stone                         46

       VI. An evening at Miss Blake's                               59

      VII. Too many irons in the fire                               67

     VIII. Val turns mentor                                         82

       IX. Wooed and won                                            95

        X. Fast and loose                                          112

       XI. How Captain Cavendish meant to marry Cherrie.           123

      XII. In which the wedding comes off                          138

     XIII. After the wedding                                       150

      XIV. Mining the ground                                       157

       XV. Springing the mine                                      167

      XVI. A crime                                                 179

     XVII. Found guilty                                            191

    XVIII. The darkening sky                                       207

      XIX. The flight                                              217

       XX. "One more unfortunate"                                  227

      XXI. Mrs. Butterby's lodgings                                236

     XXII. The heiress of Redmon                                   247

    XXIII. The heiress of Redmon enters society                    259

     XXIV. The spell of the enchantress                            275

      XXV. The double compact                                      283

     XXVI. Mr. Paul Wyndham                                        299

    XXVII. Mr. Wyndham's wooing                                    312

   XXVIII. Mr. Wyndham's wedding                                   324

     XXIX. Mr. Wyndham's mother                                    336

      XXX. Very mysterious                                         349

     XXXI. Val's discovery                                         366

    XXXII. Cherrie tells the truth                                 377

   XXXIII. Overtaken                                               391

    XXXIV. The Vesper-Hymn                                         406

     XXXV. "Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore'"                          417

    XXXVI. Drifting out                                            425

   XXXVII. Dies Irae, Dies Illa                                     430

  XXXVIII. Out of the crooked ways                                 450

    XXXIX. In Hope                                                 478




A CHANGED HEART.




CHAPTER I.

MISS McGREGOR AT HOME.


It was a foggy night in Speckport. There was nothing uncommon in its
being foggy this close May evening; but it was rather provoking and
ungallant of the clerk of the weather, seeing that Miss McGregor
particularly desired it to be fine. Miss Jeannette (she had been
christened plain Jane, but scorned to answer to anything so
unromantic)--Miss Jeannette McGregor was at home to-night to all the
elite of Speckport; and as a good many of the elite owned no other
conveyance than that which Nature had given them, it was particularly
desirable the weather should be fine. But it wasn't fine; it was nasty
and drizzly, and sultry and foggy; and sky and sea were blotted out; and
the gas-lamps sprinkled through the sloppy streets of Speckport blinked
feebly through the gloom; and people buttoned up to the chin and wrapped
in cloaks flitted by each other like phantoms, in the pale blank of wet
and fog. And half the year round that is the sort of weather they enjoy
in Speckport.

You don't know Speckport! There I have the advantage of you; for I know
its whole history, past, present, and--future, I was going to say,
though I don't set up for a prophet; but the future of Speckport does
not seem hard to foretell. The Union-jack floats over it, the State of
Maine is its next-door neighbor, and fish and fog are its principal
productions. It also had the honor of producing Miss McGregor, who was
born one other foggy night, just two-and-twenty years previous to this
"At Home," to which you and I are going presently, in a dirty little
black street, which she scorns to know even by name now. Two-and-twenty
years ago, Sandy McGregor worked as a day-laborer in a shipyard, at
three and sixpence per day. Now, Mr. Alexander McGregor is a
ship-builder, and has an income of ten thousand gold dollars per year.
Not a millionaire, you know; but very well off, and very comfortable,
and very contented; living in a nice house, nicely furnished, keeping
horses and carriage, and very much looked up to, and very much respected
in Speckport.

Speckport has its Fifth Avenue as well as New York. Not that they call
it Fifth Avenue, you understand; its name is Golden Row, and the abiders
therein are made of the porcelain of human clay. Great people, magnates
and aristocrats to their finger-tips, scorning the pigmies who move in
second and third society and have only the happiness of walking through
Golden Row, never of dwelling there. The houses were not brown-stone
fronts. Oh, no! there were half-a-dozen brick buildings, some pretty,
little Gothic cottages, with green vines, and beehives, and bird-houses,
about them, and all the rest were great painted palaces of wood. Some
had green shutters, and some had not; some were painted white, and some
brown, and some stone-color and drab, and they all had a glittering air
of spickspan-newness about them, as if their owners had them painted
every other week. And in one of these palaces Mr. McGregor lived.

You drove down Golden Row through the fog and drizzle, between the
blinking lamps, and you stop at a stone- house with a brown
hall-door, and steps going up to it. The hall is brilliant with gas, so
is the drawing-room, so are the two parlors, so is the dining-room, so
are the dressing rooms; and the elite of Speckport are bustling and
jostling one another about, and making considerable noise, and up in the
gallery the band is in full blast at the "Lancers"--for they know how
to dance the Lancers in Speckport--and the young ladies dipping and
bowing through the intricacies of the dance, wear their dresses just as
low in the neck and as short in the sleeves as any Fifth avenue belle
dare to do.

Very pretty girls they are, floating about in all the colors of the
rainbow. There are no diamonds, perhaps, except glass ones; but there
are gold chains and crosses, and bracelets, and lockets and things; and
some of the young ladies have rings right up to the middle joint of
their fingers. The young gentlemen wear rings, too, and glittering
shirt-studs and bosom-pins, and are good looking and gentlemanly. While
the young folks dance, the old folks play wallflower or cards, or take
snuff or punch, or talk politics. All the juvenile rag-tag and bobtail
of Speckport are outside, gaping up with open-mouthed admiration at the
blazing front of the McGregor mansion, and swallowing the music that
floats through the open windows.

Sailing along Golden Row, with an umbrella up to protect her bonnet from
the fog, comes a tall lady, unprotected and alone, and "There's Miss Jo,
hurrah!" yells a shrill voice; and the tall lady receives her ovation
with a gratified face, and bows as she steps over the McGregor
threshold. Ten minutes later, she enters the drawing-room, divested of
her wrappings; and you see she is elderly and angular, and prim and
precise, and withal good-natured. She is sharp at the joints and
shoulder-blades, and her black silk dress is hooked up behind in the
fashion of twenty years ago. She wears no crinoline, and looks about as
graceful as a lamp-post; but she is fearfully and wonderfully fine, with
a massive gold chain about her neck that would have made a ship's cable
easily, and a cross and a locket clattering from it, and beating time to
her movements on a cameo brooch the size of a dinner-plate. Eardrops, a
finger-length long, dangle from her ears; cameo bracelets adorn her
skinny wrists; and her hair, of which she has nothing to speak of, is
worn in little corkscrew curls about her sallow face.

Miss Joanna Blake is an old maid, and looks like it; she is also an
exile of Erin, and the most inveterate gossip in Speckport.

A tremendous uproar greets her as she enters the drawing-room, and she
stops in considerable consternation.

In a recess near the door was a card-table, round which four elderly
ladies and four elderly gentlemen sat, with a laughing crowd looking on
from behind. The card-party were in a violently agitated and excited
state, all screaming out together at the top of the gamut.

Miss Jo swept on in majestic silence, nodding right and left as she
streamed down the apartment to where Mrs. McGregor stood, with a little
knot of matrons around her--a lady as