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CHAPTER VI.

STEVE'S FAIR CHANCE.

"Amid the fretful dwellings of mankind we have a foretaste of eternal peace."

"God's spice we are, and pounding is our due,
For pounding spice both taste and sense doth please."

Hope is something more than a blessing, it is a duty and a virtue, and Jonathan, dimly conscious of this fact, kept his heart turned to the light, both as regarded his daughter and Sarah Benson. He knew how essential to his own happiness a regular, well-established groove of life was, and he thought, that Eleanor's restlessness and dissatisfaction might well enough arise from the unfamiliarity of the circumstances attending so radical a change as marriage.

The elation and pleasure of her first letters from London delighted him. Like some brilliant bird of passage, she was flitting through the charmed circle which hedged in the splendid majesty of the throne, and he felt all the glow of her social triumph and all the pleasure of

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