'Yes, I see your position,' she answered. 'But think of mine! What can
I do? Without your support it would seem an invention to save me from
disgrace; even if I produced the register, the love of scandal in the
world is such that the multitude would slur over the fact, say it was a
fabrication, and believe your story. I do not know who were the
witnesses, or anything!'

In a few minutes these two poor young women felt, as so many in a strait
have felt before, that union was their greatest strength, even now; and
they consulted calmly together. The result of their deliberations was
that Milly went home as usual, and Lady Caroline also, the latter
confessing that very night to the Countess her mother of the marriage,
and to nobody else in the world. And, some time after, Lady Caroline and
her mother went away to London, where a little while later still they
were joined by Milly, who was supposed to have left the village to
proceed to a watering-place in the North for the benefit of her health,
at the expense of the ladies of the Manor, who had been much interested
in her state of lonely and defenceless widowhood.

Early the next year the widow Milly came home with an infant in her arms,
the family at the Manor House having meanwhile gone abroad. They did not
return from their tour till the autumn ensuing, by which time Milly and
the child had again departed from the cottage of her father the woodman,
Milly having attained to the dignity of dwelling in a cottage of her own,
many miles to the eastward of her native village; a comfortable little
allowance had moreover been settled on her and the child for life,
through the instrumentality of Lady Caroline and her mother.

Two or three years passed away, and the Lady Caroline married a
nobleman--the Marquis of Stonehenge--considerably her senior, who had
wooed her long and phlegmatically. He was not rich, but she led a placid
life with him for many years, though there was no child of the marriage.
Meanwhile Milly's boy, as the youngster was called, and as Milly herself
considered him, grew up, and throve wonderfully, and loved her as she
deserved to be loved for her devotion to him, in whom she every day
traced more distinctly the lineaments of the man who had won her girlish
heart, and kept it even in the tomb.

She educated him as well as she could with the limited means at her
disposal, for the allowance had never been increased, Lady Caroline, or
the Marchiones