it is surely best that you should
know all."

The doctor then proceeded to detail, with some circumlocution, what we
will here repeat from his account more succinctly.

Nora Avenel, while yet very young, left her native village, or rather
the house of Lady Lansinere, by whom she had been educated and brought
up, in order to accept the place of companion to a lady in London. One
evening she suddenly presented herself at her father's house, and at
the first sight of her mother's face she fell down insensible. She was
carried to bed. Dr. Morgan (then the chief medical practitioner of the
town) was sent for. That night Leonard came into the world, and his
mother died. She never recovered her senses, never spoke intelligibly
from the time she entered the house. "And never, therefore, named your
father," said Dr. Morgan. "We knew not who he was."

"And how," cried Leonard, fiercely,--"how have they dared to slander
this dead mother? How knew they that I--was--was--was not the child of
wedlock?"

"There was no wedding-ring on Nora's finger, never any rumour of her
marriage; her strange and sudden appearance at her father's house; her
emotions on entrance, so unlike those natural to a wife returning to a
parent's home,--these are all the evidence against her. But Mrs. Avenel
deemed them strong, and so did I. You have a right to think we judged
too harshly,--perhaps we did."

"And no inquiries were ever made?" said Leonard, mournfully, and after
a long silence,--"no inquiries to learn who was the father of the
motherless child?"

"Inquiries! Mrs. Avenel would have died first. Your grandmother's nature
is very rigid. Had she come from princes, from Cadwallader himself,"
said the Welshman, "she could not more have shrunk from the thought of
dishonour. Even over her dead child, the child she had loved the best,
she thought but how to save that child's name and memory from suspicion.
There was luckily no servant in the house, only Mark Fairfield and his
wife (Nora's sister): they had arrived the same day on a visit.

"Mrs. Fairfield was nursing her own infant two or three months old; she
took charge of you; Nora was buried and the secret kept. None out of the
family knew of it but myself and the curate of the town,--Mr. Dale. The
day after your birth, Mrs. Fairfield, to prevent discovery, moved to a
village at some distance. There her child died; and when she returned to
Hazeldean, where her husband was settled, you passed a