ou know?" and
then she sat down to write.

She stopped so many times to cry over it that it was midnight when the
writing was finished. It was a letter, and the superscription read as
follows:--

"To my lover, Paul, who will never love me any mere after he reads this,
but whom I shall love for ever:--

"This letter will explain to you why my room is empty this morning. I
could stand it no longer: to be loved and almost worshipped, by those
whom I was basely deceiving. And so I have fled. You will never see me or
hear from me again, and you will never want to after you have read this
letter. All the jewellery and dresses, and everything that Miss Ludington
has given me, I have left behind, except the clothes I had to have to go
away in, and these I will return as soon as I get where I am going. Oh,
my poor Paul! I am no more Ida Ludington than you are. How could you ever
believe such a thing? But let me tell my shameful story in order. Perhaps
it was not so strange that you were deceived. I think any one might have
been who held the belief you did at the outset.

"I am Ida Slater, Mrs. Slater's daughter, whom she named after Miss
Ludington, because she thought her name so pretty when they went to
school together as children in Hilton. I was born in Hilton twenty-three
years ago, several years after Miss Ludington left the village. My father
is Mr. Slater, of course, but he is the person you know as Dr. Hull,
which is an assumed name. Mrs. Legrand, who is no more dead than you are,
is a sister of my father. Her husband is dead, and father acts as her
manager, and mother helps about the seances, and does what she can in any
way to bring a little money. We have always been very poor, and it has
been very, very hard for us to get a living. Father is a man of
education, and had tried many things before we came to this, but nothing
succeeded. We grew poorer and poorer, and when this business came in our
way he had to take up with it or send us to the almshouse. It is not an
honest business, at least as we conducted it; but, oh, Paul! none of you
that are rich understand that to a very poor man the duty of supporting
his family seems sometimes as if it were the only duty in the world.

"Well, when mother came to visit Miss Ludington, and saw that picture
which is so much like me, and so little, mother says, like what Miss
Ludington ever was, and when she found out about your belief in the
immortality of past selves, the id