SUSAN LAWTON'S ESCAPE.
I never heard of a girl who had her own way so completely, so delightfully, and so respectably as Susan Sweetser did. She was an only child. Her mother died when she was a baby; her father, who had never married again, died when she was sixteen. He left a large fortune, the income of which was to be paid to Susan until she was twenty-one, and at that time the whole estate was to come into her hands as unreservedly as if she had been a man. Her guardian, whose function was simply a nominal one, was her uncle by marriage, Thomas Lawton, a man not more than a dozen years older than herself,—an easy going, indolent, rich fellow, who never gave himself any concern about Susan further than the depositing in the bank each quarter the thousands of dollars which she might spend as she liked. Mrs. Thomas Lawton was a girl only a few years older than Susan, and one after her own heart; and when, two years after the death of her father, Susan took up her abode in the Lawton
