hat she should be dead,--much better that she should be dead. She
is all that I have, Sir William. It is for her sake that I have been
struggling from the first moment in which I knew that I was to be a
mother. The whole care of my life has been to prove her to be her
father's daughter in the eye of the law. I doubt whether you can know
what it is to pursue one object, and only one, through your whole
life, with never-ending solicitude,--and to do it all on behalf of
another. If you did, you would understand my feeling now. It would be
better for her that she should die than become the wife of such a one
as Daniel Thwaite."

"Lady Lovel, not only as a mother, but as a Christian, you should get
the better of that feeling."

"Of course I should. No doubt every clergyman in England would tell
me the same thing. It is easy to say all that, sir. Wait till you
are tried. Wait till all your ambition is to be betrayed, every hope
rolled in the dust, till all the honours you have won are to be
soiled and degraded, till you are made a mark for general scorn and
public pity,--and then tell me how you love the child by whom such
evils are brought upon you!"

"I trust that I may never be so tried, Lady Lovel."

"I hope not; but think of all that before you preach to me. But I
do love her; and it is because I love her that I would fain see her
removed from the reproaches which her own madness will bring upon
her. Let her die;--if it be God's will. I can follow her without
one wish for a prolonged life. Then will a noble family be again
established, and her sorrowful tale will be told among the Lovels
with a tear and without a curse."

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

LADY ANNA'S BEDSIDE.

All December went by, and the neighbours in the houses round spent
each his merry Christmas; and the snow and frost of January passed
over them, and February had come and nearly gone, before the
doctors dared to say that Lady Anna Lovel's life was not still in
danger. During this long period the world had known all about her
illness,--as it did know, or pretended to know, the whole history of
her life. The world had been informed that she was dying, and had,
upon the whole, been really very sorry for her. She had interested
the world, and the world had heard much of her youth and beauty,--of
the romance too of her story, of her fidelity to the tailor, and of
her persecutions. During these months of her illness the world was
disposed to think that