interview you will not rebuke me. Will you, my kind
uncle? No, you will only soothe and pity!

"Would that I were worthy to pray for others, that I might add, 'May
the Saints have you in their keeping and lead you to faith in the Holy
Church, which has power to absolve from sins those who repent as I do.'"

The letter dropped from Victor's hand. He took it up, smoothed it
mechanically, and with a dim, abstracted, be wildered, pitiful wonder.
Well might the Superieure have hesitated to allow confessions, betraying
a mind so little regulated by genuine religious faith, to pass into
other hands. Evidently it was the paramount duty of rescuing from want
or from sin the writer's forsaken child, that had overborne all other
considerations in the mind of the Woman and the Priest she consulted.

Throughout that letter, what a strange perversion of understanding! what
a half-unconscious confusion of wrong and right!--the duty marked out so
obvious and so neglected; even the religious sentiment awakened by the
conscience so dividing itself from the moral instinct! the dread of
being thought less religious by obscure comparative strangers stronger
than the moral obligation to discover and reclaim the child for whose
errors, if she had erred, the mother who so selfishly forsook her was
alone responsible! even at the last, at the approach of death, the love
for a name she had never made a self-sacrifice to preserve unstained;
and that concluding exhortation,--that reliance on a repentance in which
there was so qualified a reparation!

More would Victor de Mauldon have wondered had he known those points
of similarity in character, and in the nature of their final bequests,
between Louise Duval and the husband she had deserted. By one of those
singular coincidences which, if this work be judged by the ordinary
rules presented to the ordinary novel-reader, a critic would not
unjustly impute to defective invention in the author, the provision for
this child, deprived of its natural parents during their lives, is left
to the discretion and honour of trustees, accompanied on the part of
the consecrated Louise and "the blameless King," with the injunction
of respect to their worldly reputations--two parents so opposite in
condition, in creed, in disposition, yet assimilating in that point of
individual character in which it touches the wide vague circle of human
opinion. For this, indeed, the excuses of Richard King are strong,
inasmuch