Though fond of admiration, the young Joanna of Orkney had held herself
at too high a price, to bestow a thought on the crowd of rough sons of
the surge (chiefs of the surrounding isles, who owned her father as
lord), who daily adulated her charms with all the costliest trophies
from their ocean-spoils. She trod past them, and by all the female
beauties in her isle, with the step of an undisputed right to receive,
and to despise. But when she crossed to the mainland, and found
herself by the side of a woman almost as young as herself, and equally
beautiful, though of a different mold, soft and retreating, while hers
commanded and compelled; and that the husband of that woman, whose
tender adoration hovered over her with a perpetual eye; that he, though
of comparative veteran years, was handsomer than any man she had ever
seen, and fraught with every noble grace to delight the female heart;
she felt what she had never done before, that she had met a rival and
an object worthy to subdue.
What Joanna began in mere excited vanity, jealous pride, and ambition
of conquest, ended in a fatal attachment to the husband of her
innocent and too confiding protectress.
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