week old.

No daughter ever received more affection or better care than these good
people gave you. Mrs. Marchmont lived always with a fear in her heart
that you might learn your history from some idle or malicious lip, and
before she died begged me to be your comforting friend, if that hour
ever came, which has now arrived.

As your mother's nearest friend, it is natural you should turn to me in
your crucial hour of pain. And in reply to your questions regarding the
truth of this anonymous assertion, I will tell you all I know.

Your own mother was well born, and a girl of great beauty and charm. She
was of foreign blood, and her parents, after the foreign custom,
selected for her, at the age of seventeen, a man of mature years and
unattractive personality, but some fortune. The family lived in a
seaport town, and your mother attracted the eye of a young seafaring
man, holding a government position. An intense and uncontrollable love
sprang up between them. Your mother had been kept in ignorance of God's
great law of sex attraction, its purpose and its results, and she was
like a new-born babe towed on the sea of her own suddenly awakened
emotion.

It was arranged that your mother was to elope with her lover on his next
arrival in port. All plans were to be made by him during the voyage on
which he went forth, after a stolen interview with your mother. He was
lost at sea, and all on board the ship perished with him. Mr. and Mrs.
Marchmont chanced to be sojourning in the place at the time of your
birth. Mr. Marchmont had longed for a child, and the tragic story came
to his ears through the physician of your mother's family, and he and
his wife decided to adopt you and take you to America.

I was the one friend who shared with Mrs. Marchmont the story of your
birth. Other friends knew she had adopted a child, and of course all
sorts of rumours were afloat for a time. Mr. Marchmont's nephew was
particularly unfriendly, I remember, as he had believed himself heir to
his uncle's estate until your adoption.

Some three years ago I chanced to be in the seaport town where you were
born, and I made quiet inquiries about your mother. I learned that she
had recently died, leaving a husband and three children. I hunted up the
children, and found them to be most uninteresting and ordinary. The
oldest daughter I met and studied. She was plain and commonplace in
appearance, and the other children were dull and unattractive.