sitated now to fling insult
upon insult on the wretched woman who had more than paid her debt to
her own careless frivolity of long ago.

"Thy brother's name was Henry Adam de Chavasse, and thine Michael
Richard de Chavasse, sons of Rowland de Chavasse, and of the wanton who
was his wife."

The old woman had taken a packet of papers, yellow with age and stained
with many tears, from out a secret drawer of the old oak dresser.

Her voice was no longer tremulous as it was wont to be, but firm and
dull, monotonous in tone like that of one who speaks whilst in a trance.
Squire Boatfield had uttered an exclamation of boundless astonishment.
Mechanically he took the packet of papers from the Quakeress's hand and
after an instant's hesitation, and in response to an appealing look from
Richard, he broke the string which held the documents together and
perused them one by one.

But Editha, even as the last of the old woman's words ceased to echo in
the narrow room, had risen to her feet. Her heavy cloak glided off her
shoulders down upon the ground; her eyes, preternaturally large, glowing
and full of awe, were now fixed upon the young man--her son.

"De Chavasse," she murmured, her brain whirling, her heart filled not
only with an awful terror, but also with a great and overwhelming joy.
"My sons ... then I am ..."

But with a peremptory gesture the Quakeress had stopped the word in her
mouth.

"Nay!" she said loudly, "do not pollute that sacred name by letting it
pass through thy lips. Women such as thou were not made for
motherhood.... Thy own mother knew that, when she took thy children from
thee and cursed thee on her death-bed for thy sins and for thy shame!
Thy sons were honest, God-fearing men, but 'tis no thanks to thee. Thou
alone hast heaped shame upon their dead father's name and hast contrived
to wreak ruin on the sons who knew thee not."

The Quakeress paused a moment, her pale opaque eyes lighted with an
inward glow of wrath and of satisfied vengeance. She and her dead friend
and all their co-religionists had hated the woman, who, in defiance of
her own Puritanic upbringing, had cast aside her friends and her home in
order to throw herself in that vortex of pleasure, which her mother
considered evil and infamous.

Together they had all rejoiced over this woman's subsequent humiliation,
her sorrow and longing for her children, the ceaseless search, the
ever-recurrent disappointments. Now the Quakeress's