n-law perfectly
miserable, and that was what I desired.

'You were born a year after your father's return home, and when the
other child was three years old. To say that I then found myself in an
intolerable position would not be to overstate the case. If your
father had lived, my difficulties would have been greater than they
actually were, and it was during his lifetime and after your birth that
I suffered most. I suppose only a woman, and one, moreover, who has
longed for children, would be able to realize what my feelings were,
and I shall not urge your compassion by dwelling upon that time. I
have never accepted pity, and I should prefer not to have it bestowed
upon me when I am dead.

'It was only after your father's death that I saw a way of escape out
of the intolerable position in which I had placed myself. I was in
very bad health for a time, and my husband's affection for the alien
child was more than I was able to bear. There is always a touch of the
savage in motherhood, and I am naturally jealous.

'After my husband's death I went out to my own property in Spain, and
by judiciously moving about there from one place to another, and
changing my personal servants frequently, it was a comparatively easy
matter to say that the child had died, without exactly specifying where
his death had taken place.

'It was absolutely necessary that he should be got rid of. A pauper
emigrant's boy was taking the place of my son in everything. The very
tenants about the place treated him differently from the way in which
they treated you. My husband had decided that the bilk of his property
was to go to him; and all the time I knew that his father was from the
class from which perhaps, navvies are drawn, and that his mother was
some girl from Whitechapel or Mile End.

'He had to go, but I treated him fairly. I took him down to Lisbon
myself and sent him back to his father with a trustworthy couple who
were going out there. From my own private fortune I bestowed upon him
a sum sufficient to educate him and to place him in the world.

'I think I never breathed freely or had one undisturbed moment from the
time you were born until he had gone to Argentine.

'The people to whom I entrusted him both died of fever in Rosario, and
from that day to this I have never heard of the boy who was called
Edward Ogilvie. The money which I had bestowed upon him had proved too
tempting to some one. The child disappeared, a