,
in advance, most heartily.

The letter was signed with her father's name, the same signature which
had been attached to the will.

Having firmly convinced herself of the illegality of the papers, and of
her own right to destroy them, Mrs. Carteret ought to have felt relieved
that she had thus removed all traces of her dead father's folly. True,
the other daughter remained,--she had seen her on the street only the
day before. The sight of this person she had always found offensive, and
now, she felt, in view of what she had just learned, it must be even
more so. Never, while this woman lived in the town, would she be able to
throw the veil of forgetfulness over this blot upon her father's memory.

As the day wore on, Mrs. Carteret grew still less at ease. To herself,
marriage was a serious thing,--to a right-thinking woman the most
serious concern of life. A marriage certificate, rightfully procured,
was scarcely less solemn, so far as it went, than the Bible itself. Her
own she cherished as the apple of her eye. It was the evidence of her
wifehood, the seal of her child's legitimacy, her patent of
nobility,--the token of her own and her child's claim to social place
and consideration. She had burned this pretended marriage certificate
because it meant nothing. Nevertheless, she could not ignore the
knowledge of another such marriage, of which every one in the town
knew,--a celebrated case, indeed, where a white man, of a family quite
as prominent as her father's, had married a colored woman during the
military occupation of the state just after the civil war. The legality
of the marriage had never been questioned. It had been fully consummated
by twenty years of subsequent cohabitation. No amount of social
persecution had ever shaken the position of the husband. With an iron
will he had stayed on in the town, a living protest against the
established customs of the South, so rudely interrupted for a few short
years; and, though his children were negroes, though he had never
appeared in public with his wife, no one had ever questioned the
validity of his marriage or the legitimacy of his offspring.

The marriage certificate which Mrs. Carteret had burned dated from the
period of the military occupation. Hence Mrs. Carteret, who was a good
woman, and would not have done a dishonest thing, felt decidedly
uncomfortable. She had destroyed the marriage certificate, but its ghost
still haunted her.

Major Carteret, havi