letter
confirms that view. This is what has hit Edgar so hard."

The letter was as follows:--

"My dearest father, for I cannot call you anything else, I have just
heard about my birth from a woman who calls herself my mother, and who,
I suppose, has a right to do so, though certainly I shall never call her
or think of her so. She has told me about her child and yours getting
mixed, and how you brought both up in hopes of finding out some day
which was which.

"Rupert and I had noticed for some days a woman looking at us, and she
met me this afternoon and said she had some thing of extreme importance
to tell me. I went with her and she told me the story, and said that I
was her son and not yours. I asked her how she knew me from Rupert, and
she said that one of us had a small mole on the shoulder. I knew that
Rupert had a tiny mole there, and she said that that was the mark by
which she knew your son from hers.

"Then, father, she told me that she had done it all on purpose, and had
sacrificed herself in order that I might benefit from it. This was all
horrible! And then she actually proposed that I should not only keep
silent about this, but offered to come forward and declare that it was
her son who had the mole on his shoulder, so that I might get the whole
and Rupert none. I don't want to say what I felt. I only told her I
would think it over. I have been thinking it over, and I am going away.
My dear father and mother, for I shall always think of you so, I thank
you for all your love and kindness, which I have received through a
horrible fraud. If it had all been an accident, and you had found out
for yourselves by the likeness that Rupert was your son, I do not think
that I should have minded, at least nothing like so much. I should, of
course, have been very grieved that you were not my father and mother,
and that Rupert and Madge were not my brother and sister; but it would
have been nobody's fault, and I am sure that you would all still have
loved me. But to know that it has been a wicked fraud, that I have been
an impostor palmed upon you, that there has been a plot and conspiracy
to rob you, and that I have a mother who not only did this, but who
could propose to me to go on deceiving you, and even to join in a fresh
fraud and to swindle Rupert, is so awful that there is nothing for me to
do but to go away.

"I feel sure you will all be sorry, and that though I am not your son
you would go on treating m