t condemn her child
because of the father's guilt,--she, the proudest woman I ever knew, she
whose smile I can at rare moments detect in Lily, raised her head from
her pillow, and gasped forth,--

"I am dying: the last words of the dying are commands. I command you to
see that my child's lot is not that of a felon's daughter transported to
the hearth of nobles. To be happy, her lot must be humble: no roof too
humble to shelter, no husband too humble to wed, the felon's daughter."

From that hour I formed a resolve that I would keep hand and heart
free, that when the grandchild of my princely benefactor grew up into
womanhood I might say to her, "I am humbly born, but thy mother would
have given thee to me." The newborn, consigned to our charge, has now
ripened into woman, and I have now so assured my fortune that it is
no longer poverty and struggle that I should ask her to share. I am
conscious that, were her fate not so exceptional, this hope of mine
would be a vain presumption,--conscious that I am but the creature
of her grandsire's bounty, and that from it springs all I ever can
be,--conscious of the disparity in years,-conscious of many a past error
and present fault. But, as fate so ordains, such considerations are
trivial; I am her rightful choice. What other choice, compatible with
these necessities which weigh, dear and honoured friend, immeasurably
more on your sense of honour than they do upon mine? and yet mine is
not dull. Granting, then, that you, her nearest and most responsible
relative, do not contemn me for presumption, all else seems to me clear.
Lily's childlike affection for me is too deep and too fond not to
warm into a wife's love. Happily, too, she has not been reared in the
stereotyped boarding-school shallowness of knowledge and vulgarities of
gentility; but educated, like myself, by the free influences of Nature,
longing for no halls and palaces save those that we build as we list, in
fairyland; educated to comprehend and share the fancies which are
more than booklore to the worshipper of art and song. In a day or two,
perhaps the day after you receive this, I shall be able to escape from
London, and most likely shall come on foot as usual. How I long to
see once more the woodbine on the hedgerows, the green blades of the
cornfields, the sunny lapse of the river, and dearer still the tiny
falls of our own little noisy rill! Meanwhile I entreat you, dearest,
gentlest, most honored of such few