came back, and clasped my wife to the most loving and faithful heart
that ever beat in a husband's breast. I write this even with tears--I,
who have been so cold. But in this letter--which no eye will ever see
until I and your mother have lain together long years in our grave--I
write as if I were speaking, not as now, but as I should speak then.

"Well, between my wife and me there came a cloud. I know not whose was
the fault--perhaps mine, perhaps hers; or, it might be, both. But there
the cloud was--it hung over my home, so that I could find therein
no peace, no refuge. It drove me to money-getting, excitement,
amusement--at last to crime!

"In the West Indies there was one who had loved me, in vain,--mark you,
I said _in vain_,--but with the vehemence of her southern blood. She was
a Quadroon lady--one of that miserable race, the children of planters
and slaves, whose beauty is their curse, whose passion knows no law
except a blind fidelity. And, God forgive me! that poor wretch was
faithful unto me.

"She followed me to England without my knowledge. Little she had ever
heard of marriage; she found no sacred-ness in mine. I did not love
her--not with a pure heart as I loved Sybilla. But I pitied her.
Sometimes I turned from my dreary home--where no eye brightened at mine,
where myself and my interests were nothing--and I thought of this woman,
to whom I was all the world. My daughter Olive, if ever you be a wife,
and would keep your husband's love, never let these thoughts enter and
pollute his mind. Give him your whole heart, and he will ask no other.
Make his home sweet and pleasant to him, and he will not stray from it.
Bind him round with cords of love--fast--fast. Oh, that my wife had had
strength so to encircle me!

"But she had not; and so the end came! Olive, you are not my _only_
child.

"I have no desire to palliate my sin. Sin, I know it was, heavy and
deadly; against God's law, against my trusting wife, and against that
hapless creature on whom I brought a whole lifetime of misery. Ay,
not on her alone, but on that innocent being who has received from me
nothing but the heritage of shame, and to whom in this world I can never
make atonement. No man can! I felt this when she was born. It was a
girl, too--a helpless girl. I looked on the little face, sleeping
so purely, and remembered that on her brow would rest through life a
perpetual stain; and that I, her father, had fixed it there. Then there
a