ught
to her, the reviving tenderness which she had felt while he sat on her
knee, influenced her still. She was conscious of a dawning hope, opening
freshly on her thoughts, as the boy's innocent eyes had opened on her
face when he came to her on the beach. Was it too late to turn back?
Once more she asked herself that question, and now, for the first time,
she asked it in doubt.

She ran up to her own room with a lurking distrust in her changed self
which warned her to act, and not to think. Without waiting to remove her
shawl or to take off her hat, she opened her writing-case and addressed
these lines to Captain Wragge as fast as her pen could trace them:

"You will find the money I promised you inclosed in this. My resolution
has failed me. The horror of marrying him is more than I can face. I
have left Aldborough. Pity my weakness, and forget me. Let us never meet
again."

With throbbing heart, with eager, trembling fingers, she drew her little
white silk bag from her bosom and took out the banknotes to inclose
them in the letter. Her hand searched impetuously; her hand had lost its
discrimination of touch. She grasped the whole contents of the bag in
one handful of papers, and drew them out violently, tearing some and
disarranging the folds of others. As she threw them down before her on
the table, the first object that met her eye was her own handwriting,
faded already with time. She looked closer, and saw the words she
had copied from her dead father's letter--saw the lawyer's brief and
terrible commentary on them confronting her at the bottom of the page:

_Mr. Vanstone's daughters are Nobody's Children, and the law leaves them
helpless at their uncle's mercy._

Her throbbing heart stopped; her trembling hands grew icily quiet. All
the Past rose before her in mute, overwhelming reproach. She took up the
lines which her own hand had written hardly a minute since, and looked
at the ink, still wet on the letters, with a vacant incredulity.

The color that had risen on her cheeks faded from them once more. The
hard despair looked out again, cold and glittering, in her tearless
eyes. She folded the banknotes carefully, and put them back in her bag.
She pressed the copy of her father's letter to her lips, and returned
it to its place with the banknotes. When the bag was in her bosom
again, she waited a little, with her face hidden in her hands, then
deliberately tore up the lines addressed to Captain Wragge. Be