ness and cleanliness beneath
which she had striven to hid her poverty I read all the terrible
sufferings of her life; she was nobly reticent about them in her effort
to spare my feelings, and only alluded to them after I had solemnly
promised to adopt our child. She died, sir, in spite of all the care
lavished upon her, and all that science could suggest was done for her
in vain. The care and devotion that had come too late only served to
render her last moments less bitter.

"To support her little one she had worked incessantly with her needle.
Love for her child had given her strength to endure her life of
hardship; but it had not enabled her to bear my desertion, the keenest
of all her griefs. Many times she had thought of trying to see me, but
her woman's pride had always prevented this. While I squandered floods
of gold upon my caprices, no memory of the past had ever bidden a single
drop to fall in her home to help mother and child to live; but she had
been content to weep, and had not cursed me; she had looked upon her
evil fortune as the natural punishment of her error. With the aid of a
good priest of Saint Sulpice, whose kindly voice had restored peace to
her soul, she had sought for hope in the shadow of the altar, whither
she had gone to dry her tears. The bitter flood that I had poured into
her heart gradually abated; and one day, when she heard her child say
'Father,' a word that she had not taught him, she forgave my crime. But
sorrow and weeping and days and nights of ceaseless toil injured her
health. Religion had brought its consolations and the courage to bear
the ills of life, but all too late. She fell ill of a heart complaint
brought on by grief and by the strain of expectation, for she always
thought that I should return, and her hopes always sprang up afresh
after every disappointment. Her health grew worse; and at last, as she
was lying on her deathbed, she wrote those few lines, containing no word
of reproach, prompted by religion, and by a belief in the goodness in my
nature. She knew, she said, that I was blinded rather than bent on doing
wrong. She even accused herself of carrying her womanly pride too far.
'If I had only written sooner,' she said, 'perhaps there might have been
time for a marriage which would have legitimated our child.'

"It was only on her child's account that she wished for the
solemnization of the ties that bound us, nor would she have sought for
this if she had not fe