pon him--that which caused all the
train of your innumerable ills!'

'I know all--all. And I do forgive you. Not in a hasty impulse that is
revoked when coolness comes, but deliberately and sincerely: as I myself
hope to be forgiven, I accord you my forgiveness now.'

Tears streamed from Miss Aldclyffe's eyes, and mingled with those of her
young companion, who could not restrain hers for sympathy. Expressions
of strong attachment, interrupted by emotion, burst again and again from
the broken-spirited woman.

'But you don't know my motive. O, if you only knew it, how you would
pity me then!'

Cytherea did not break the pause which ensued, and the elder woman
appeared now to nerve herself by a superhuman effort. She spoke on in a
voice weak as a summer breeze, and full of intermission, and yet there
pervaded it a steadiness of intention that seemed to demand firm tones
to bear it out worthily.

'Cytherea,' she said, 'listen to me before I die.

'A long time ago--more than thirty years ago--a young girl of seventeen
was cruelly betrayed by her cousin, a wild officer of six-and-twenty. He
went to India, and died.

'One night when that miserable girl had just arrived home with her
parents from Germany, where her baby had been born, she took all the
money she possessed, pinned it on her infant's bosom, together with
a letter, stating, among other things, what she wished the child's
Christian name to be; wrapped up the little thing, and walked with it to
Clapham. Here, in a retired street, she selected a house. She placed
the child on the doorstep and knocked at the door, then ran away and
watched. They took it up and carried it indoors.

'Now that her poor baby was gone, the girl blamed herself bitterly for
cruelty towards it, and wished she had adopted her parents' counsel to
secretly hire a nurse. She longed to see it. She didn't know what to do.
She wrote in an assumed name to the woman who had taken it in, and asked
her to meet the writer with the infant at certain places she named.
These were hotels or coffee-houses in Chelsea, Pimlico, or Hammersmith.
The woman, being well paid, always came, and asked no questions. At one
meeting--at an inn in Hammersmith--she made her appearance without the
child, and told the girl it was so ill that it would not live through
the night. The news, and fatigue, brought on a fainting-fit....'

Miss Aldclyffe's sobs choked her utterance, and she became painfully
agitated. Cyther