ords, and opened the folding-doors which led from
the parlor into a back room. After an absence of a few moments only, she
returned."

At that crowning point in the narrative, my mother stopped. Was she
afraid to go on? or did she think it needless to say more?

"Well?" I said.

"Must I really tell it to you in words, George? Can't you guess how it
ended, even yet?"

There were two difficulties in the way of my understanding her. I had
a man's bluntness of perception, and I was half maddened by suspense.
Incredible as it may appear, I was too dull to guess the truth even now.

"When she returned to me," my mother resumed, "she was not alone. She
had with her a lovely little girl, just old enough to walk with the help
of her mother's hand. She tenderly kissed the child, and then she put it
on my lap. 'There is my only comfort,' she said, simply; 'and there is
the obstacle to my ever becoming Mr. Germaine's wife.'"

Van Brandt's child! Van Brandt's child!

The postscript which she had made me add to my letter; the
incomprehensible withdrawal from the employment in which she was
prospering; the disheartening difficulties which had brought her to the
brink of starvation; the degrading return to the man who had cruelly
deceived her--all was explained, all was excused now! With an infant at
the breast, how could she obtain a new employment? With famine staring
her in the face, what else could the friendless woman do but return to
the father of her child? What claim had I on her, by comparison with
_him_? What did it matter, now that the poor creature secretly returned
the love that I felt for her? There was the child, an obstacle between
us--there was _his_ hold on her, now that he had got her back! What was
_my_ hold worth? All social proprieties and all social laws answered the
question: Nothing!

My head sunk on my breast; I received the blow in silence.

My good mother took my hand. "You understand it now, George?" she said,
sorrowfully.

"Yes, mother; I understand it."

"There was one thing she wished me to say to you, my dear, which I have
not mentioned yet. She entreats you not to suppose that she had the
faintest idea of her situation when she attempted to destroy herself.
Her first suspicion that it was possible she might become a mother was
conveyed to her at Edinburgh, in a conversation with her aunt. It is
impossible, George, not to feel compassionately toward this poor woman.
Regrettable as her posi