tion that will soon break over our family circle,
for poor little Maud has been quite ill, and I deferred my bitter
revelation until her mother's mind is composed and clear enough to
grasp the mournful truth. In the suit which I presume you will
commence, as soon as I land in America, you need apprehend no effort
on my part to elude the consequences of my own criminal folly and
rashness. I shall attempt no defence, beyond requiring my counsel to
state that no communication ever reached me from you; that I believed
you the wife of another; and I shall also insist upon the reading of
the two letters in answer to those I wrote, requesting the President
and Professor to ascertain where you were. I was assured that a
marriage contracted during my minority was invalid, and without due
investigation of the statutes of the State in which it was performed
and which had unfortunately undergone a change, I believed it. Your
right as a wife is clear, indisputable, inalienable, and cannot be
withheld; and the divorce you desire will inevitably be granted. I
cannot censure your resolution, it is due to yourself, doubly due to
your child--our child! My child! Oh! that I had known the truth
seventeen years ago! How different your fate and mine!"

She leaned back, closing her eyes, against the eloquent pleading of
that mesmeric countenance which was slowly robbing her of her stern
purposes; renewing the spell she had never been able to fully resist.

He saw the spasm of pain that wrinkled her brow, blanched her lips;
and gazing into the lovely face so dear to him, he exclaimed:

"Minnie! Minnie! Oh, my wife! My own wife!"

He sank on his knees before her, and his handsome head fell upon the
arm of her chair. She covered her face with her hands, and a
smothered sob broke from her tortured heart.

"I have sinned, but not intentionally against you. God is my witness
had I known all twenty oceans could not have kept me from my wife and
my baby. When you lived it all over again that night, when I saw you
ill, deserted, in a charity hospital, with the child you say is mine
cradled in your arms, oh! then indeed I suffered what all the pangs
of perdition cannot surpass. When you and I married we were but
children, but I loved you; afterward when I was a man, I madly
renewed those vows to one, whom I was urged, persuaded, to wed. I am
not a villain, and I know my duties to the mother of my afflicted
Maud, to the child of my loveless union,