child. However you decide, it
can never again subsist: its utter and eternal dissolution was the
inevitable homage to your purity.

'Whatever may have been my errors, whatever my crimes, for I will not
attempt to justify to you a single circumstance of my life, I humble
myself in the dust before you, and solicit only mercy; yet whatever
may have been my career, ah! Annabel, in the infinite softness of your
soul was it not for a moment pardoned? Am I indeed to suffer for that
last lamentable intrusion? You are a woman, Annabel, with a brain as
clear as your heart is pure. Judge me with calmness, Annabel; were
there no circumstances in my situation to extenuate that deplorable
connection? I will not urge them; I will not even intimate them; but
surely, Annabel, when I kneel before you full of deep repentance and
long remorse, if you could pardon the past, it is not that incident,
however mortifying to you, however disgraceful to myself, that should
be an impassable barrier to all my hopes!

'Once you loved me; I ask you not to love me now. There is nothing
about me now that can touch the heart of woman. I am old before my
time; bent with the blended influence of action and of thought, and of
physical and moral suffering. The play of my spirit has gone for ever.
My passions have expired like my hopes. The remaining sands of my life
are few. Once it was otherwise: you can recall a different picture of
the Marmion on whom you smiled, and of whom you were the first love. O
Annabel! grey, feeble, exhausted, penitent, let me stagger over your
threshold, and die! I ask no more; I will not hope for your affection;
I will not even count upon your pity; but endure my presence; let your
roof screen my last days!'

It was read; it was read again, dim as was the sight of Lady Annabel
with fast-flowing tears. Still holding the letter, but with hands
fallen, she gazed upon the shining waters before her in a fit of
abstraction. It was the voice of her child that roused her.

'Mother,' said Venetia in a tone of some decision, 'you are troubled,
and we have only one cause of trouble. That letter is from my father.'

Lady Annabel gave her the letter in silence.

Venetia withdrew almost unconsciously a few paces from her mother. She
felt this to be the crisis of her life. There never was a moment which
she believed required more fully the presence of all her energies.
Before she had addressed Lady Annabel, she had endeavoured to steel