two enclosures contained in
this letter.

"The first is addressed to Mr. Blyth. I leave it to reach his hands
through you; because I am ashamed to communicate with him directly, as
from myself. If what you said about my child be the truth--and I cannot
dispute it--then, in my ignorance of her identity, in my estrangement
from the house of her protector since she first entered it, I have
unconsciously committed such an offense against Mr. Blyth as no
contrition can ever adequately atone for. Now indeed I feel how
presumptuously merciless my bitter conviction of the turpitude of my own
sin, has made me towards what I deemed like sins in others. Now also
I know, that, unless you have spoken falsely, I have been guilty of
casting the shame of my own deserted child in the teeth of the very
man who had nobly and tenderly given her an asylum in his own home. The
unutterable anguish which only the bare suspicion of this has inflicted
on me might well have been my death. I marvel even now at my own
recovery from it.

"You are free to look at the letter to Mr. Blyth which I now entrust
to you. Besides the expression of my shame, my sorrow, and my sincere
repentance, it contains some questions, to which Mr. Blyth, in his
Christian kindness, will, I doubt not, readily write answers. The
questions only refer to the matter of the child's identity; and the
address I have written down at the end, is that of the house of business
of my lawyer and agent in London. He will forward the document to me,
and will then arrange with Mr. Blyth the manner in which a fit provision
from my property may be best secured to his adopted child. He has
deserved her love, and to him I gratefully and humbly leave her. For
myself, I am not worthy even to look upon her face.

"The second enclosure is meant for my son; and is to be delivered in the
event of your having already disclosed to him the secret of his father's
guilt. But, if you have not done this--if any mercy towards me
has entered into your heart, and pleads with it for pardon and for
silence--then destroy the letter, and tell him that he will find a
communication waiting for him at the house of my agent. He wrote to
ask my pardon--he has it freely. Freely, in my turn, I hope to have his
forgiveness for severities exercised towards him, which were honestly
meant to preserve him betimes from ever falling as his father fell,
but which I now fear were persevered in too hardly and too long. I hav