He was a perfect beauty about this time, no doubt, but that did not
prevent him from receiving the hand of his cousin Henrietta Kalouga, who
had waited for him many a weary year.
No children blessed his late marriage, and as year after year passed,
until himself and his wife were well stricken in years, people, who
never lost interest in the great estate, began to wonder to which among
his tribe of impoverished relations Nickolas Waugh would bequeath the
manor of Luckenough.
His choice fell at length upon his orphan grandniece, the beautiful
Edith Lance, whom he took from the Catholic Orphan Asylum, where she had
found refuge since the death of her parents and placed in one of the
best convent schools in the South.
At the age of seventeen Edith was brought home from school and
established at Luckenough as the adopted daughter and acknowledged
heiress of her uncle.
Delicate, dreamy and retiring, and tinged with a certain pensiveness,
the effect of too much early sorrow and seclusion upon a very sensitive
temperament, Edith better loved the solitude of the grand old forest of
St. Mary's or the loneliness of her own shaded rooms at Luckenough than
any society the humdrum neighborhood could offer her.
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