d a man who had once been a fellow soldier
of the captain's. He was called "Mr. George," and kept a
shooting-gallery. Mr. George had among his papers a letter once written
him by Captain Hawdon, and not knowing the purpose for which it was to
be used, loaned it to the lawyer. The handwriting was the same! And thus
Mr. Tulkinghorn knew that the copyist had really been Captain Hawdon and
that the letters in the bundle had once been written to him by the woman
who was now the haughty Lady Dedlock.

It was a strange, sad story that the letters disclosed, as Mr.
Tulkinghorn, gloating over his success, read them, line by line. The man
who had fallen so low as to drag out a wretched existence by copying law
papers--whom, until she saw the handwriting in the lawyer's hands, she
had believed to be dead--was a man Lady Dedlock had once loved.

Many years before, when a young woman, she had run away from home with
him. A little child was born to them whom she named Esther. When she and
Hawdon had separated, her sister, to hide from the world the knowledge
of the elopement, had told her the baby Esther was dead, had taken the
child to another part of the country, given her the name of Summerson,
and, calling herself her godmother instead of her aunt, brought her up
in ignorance of the truth. Years had gone by and Captain Hawdon was
reported drowned. At length the little Esther's mother had met and
married Sir Leicester Dedlock, and in his love and protection had
thought her dark past buried from view for ever.

All this the pitiless lawyer read in the letters, and knew that Lady
Dedlock's happiness was now in his hands. And as he thought how, with
this knowledge, he could torture her with the fear of discovery, his
face took on the look of a cat's when it plays with a mouse it has
caught.

Meanwhile Lady Dedlock had suffered much. The knowledge that Hawdon had
not been drowned as she had supposed, had come to her like a
thunderclap. And the news of his death, following so soon after this
discovery, had unnerved her. She felt Mr. Tulkinghorn's suspicious eyes
watching her always and began to tremble in dread of what he might know.

In the midst of these fears, she accidentally discovered one day that
the baby name of Esther Summerson of Bleak House had been, not
Summerson, but Hawdon.

This made Lady Dedlock guess the whole truth--that Esther was in reality
her own daughter. As soon as she was alone, she threw herself on her