endence
beyond the pittance which I have placed in trust for her in your hands.
Should it be necessary, in furtherance of the objects I have named, to
make communication of the disclosures in this letter to your son or to
Miss Johns, you have my full liberty to do so. Farther than this, I
trust you may not find it necessary to make known the facts so harmful
to the prospects and peace of my innocent child.

"I have thus made a clean breast to you, my dear Johns, and await your
scorching condemnation. But let not any portion of it, I pray, be
visited upon poor Adele. I know with what wrathful eyes you, from your
New England standpoint, are accustomed to look upon such wickedness; and
I know, too, that you are sometimes disposed to 'visit the sins of the
fathers upon the children'; but I beg that your anathemas may all rest
where they belong, upon my head, and that you will spare the motherless
girl you have taught to love you."

Up and down the study the Doctor paced, with a feverish, restless step,
which in all the history of the parsonage had never been heard in it
before.

"Such untruth!" is his exclamation. "Yet no, there has been no positive
untruth; the deception he admits."

But the great fact comes back upon his thought, that the child of sin
and shame is with him. All his old distrust and hatred of the French are
revived on the instant; the stain of their iniquities is thrust upon his
serene and quiet household. And yet what a sweet face, what a confiding
nature God has given to this creature conceived in sin! In his
simplicity, the good Doctor would have fancied that some mark of Cain
should be fixed on the poor child.

Again, the Doctor had somewhere in his heart a little of the old family
pride. The spinster had ministered to it, coyly indeed by word, but
always by manner and conduct. How it would have shocked the stout Major,
or his good mother, even, to know that he had thus fondled and fostered
the vagrant offspring of iniquity upon his hearth! A still larger and
worthier pride the Doctor cherished in his own dignity,--so long the
honored pastor of Ashfield,--so long the esteemed guide of this people
in paths of piety.

What if it should appear, that, during almost the entire period of his
holy ministrations, he had, as would seem, colluded with an old
acquaintance of his youth--a brazen reprobate--to shield him from the
shame of his own misdeeds, and to cover with the mantle of
respectability and