again meet anyone whom I have known; and so, Edith--I am going to die. I give my child to you--I believe you will not refuse my last request--and you will find her, with the woman who nursed me when she was born, at No. 2 Via del Vecchia. The woman has my instructions--she believes that I am only going away on a little trip with my husband; but you will show her this letter, and prove to her that you have authority to take the child away. When you go home, you will take her with you, as your own, and no one need ever know that she is not your own. Do not ever reveal the truth to her; let her grow up happy and care-free, like other girls who are of honorable birth; and if the dead can watch over and shield the living, you and yours shall be so shielded and watched over by your lost but still loving. BELLE."

"She was my mother! I am that child of shame!" came hoarsely from Edith's bloodless lips as she finished reading that dreadful letter. Then the paper slipped from her nerveless fingers, her head dropped unconsciously upon the table before her, and she knew nothing more until, long afterward, when she awoke from her swoon to find her lamp gone out and the room growing cold, while her heart felt as if it had been paralyzed in her bosom.

CHAPTER VII.TWO NEW ACQUAINTANCES.

Edith, when consciousness returned, had not a doubt that the letters, which she had been reading, had been penned by the hand of her own mother; that she was that little baby who had been born in Rome--that child of shame whose father had so heartlessly deserted it; whose mother, her brain turned by her suffering and wrongs, had planned to take her own life, rather than live to taint her little one's future with the shadow of her own disgrace. The knowledge of this seemed to blight, as with a lightning flash, every hope of her life.

She groped her way to the bed, for she was becoming benumbed with the cold, and threw herself upon it, utterly wretched, utterly hopeless. For hours she lay there in a sort of stupor, conscious only of one terrible fact--her shame--her ruined life! She had never dreamed, until within that hour, that she was not the daughter of those whom she had always known as her father and mother. She had known that they had gone abroad immediately after their marriage, and had spent more than a year visiting foreign countries. She had been told that she was born in Rome, in 18--, and she now realized that the letters which she had just read had been mostly written during the same year. Mrs. Allandale had never meant that she should learn this terrible secret, and that is why she had been so anxious during her last 

 Prev. P 25/275 next