pt his eyes shut tight,
and groped blindly for Schnetz's hand, which he pressed warmly.

"Perhaps it is not yet too late," he stammered, in a trembling voice.
"I hope it may still be in your power to assist me in finding a place
in life again.

"One morning about a fortnight ago a little sealed packet was brought
to me by a street messenger. It bore no address, but when I saw the
seal I felt a terrible shock. I recognized it as one I had once given
to my daughter--a cornelian, in which was cut an Egyptian scarabaeus. I
asked the man who had given it to him. A girl, he said, who had given
him an exact description of my lodging and appearance; and she had also
known my name--my present one--which I have no reason to suppose my
lost daughter had ever even heard of. I was so beside myself with
alarm, joy, and a thousand indescribable sensations that I did not
break the seal at first; only one thing seemed clear to me in my
confusion--before all else I must find the person who had sent the
messenger. Did he know where she was to be found? I asked. But she had
engaged him in the street, had paid in advance, and had then
immediately disappeared round the next corner. And then he described
her! It was my lost one, feature for feature, and yet it could not be
she herself, for this one must have been about as old as my daughter
was when I cast her off. So it must be the _child_ of my lost darling!
And to think that she, too, should flee from me like her poor mother!

"At last I tore the string off the packet, and there fell out a letter
and two small pictures--daguerreotypes, such as they used in those days
to take on silvered plates--one of them a picture of her mother, the
only thing she had taken away with her from her home, the other a young
man whose face I had great difficulty in recalling.

"The letter had been written several years before. Only in case of her
death was it to come into my hands, she wrote in the very first lines.
She had always been a proud child, and guilt and want and her sad life
had not changed her. Yet there was a loving, tender tone in her words,
a spirit of parting that softens even the hardest and most bitter
natures; and as I read her simple confession, in which she accused
herself of having robbed me of my happiness and ruined my life--of
having offended me beyond forgiveness--it seemed as if my heart would
burst. She could never prevail upon herself to return to me; at first
from fear that I