his bequest.

"I could feel nothing.

"Days and weeks passed in this apathy of despair, from which I was at
length painfully aroused by a most shocking discovery.

"Madelena, my hostess, who tenderly watched over my health had her
suspicions aroused, and put some motherly questions to me, and when I had
answered them she startled me with the announcement that in a very few
months I should become a mother.

"This news, so joyful to most good women, only filled my soul with
sorrow and dismay. It seemed to complicate my difficulties beyond all
possibility of extrication.

"Lena, poor woman, who had never heard of my marriage with the Duke of
Hereward, but had known me as the wife of the Count de Volaski, believed
that all my distress was caused by the prospect of becoming the mother of
a fatherless child, and bent all her energies to try to comfort me with
the assurance that this motherhood would be the greatest blessing of my
lonely life.

"Ah! how willing would I have confided the whole truth to this good woman
if I had dared to do so! It will show how timid I had grown when I assure
you that I, a faithful daughter of the church, had not even ventured to
go to confession once since my arrival in Italy.

"Now, Duke of Hereward, attend to my words! Had you been less bitterly
incredulous of my statements, less cruel in your judgment of me, less
murderous in your vengeance upon one much more sinned against than
sinning, I should have ventured to write to you of my condition and my
prospect of giving you an heir to your dukedom, in time to prevent your
rash and fatal act by which you unconsciously delegalized your own
lawful son!

"But your murderous cruelty had left me in a state of stupor from which
I could not rally.

"Night after night I resolved to write to you. Day after day I tried to
carry my resolution into effect. Time after time I failed through fear
of you!

"At length I persuaded myself that there was no immediate necessity for
action on my part. I might defer writing to you until the arrival of my
child. That child might prove to be a girl, who could not be your heir,
and, therefore, could not be an object of momentous importance to you; or
it might die. Either of which circumstance would relieve me from the
painful duty of opening a correspondence with you; or I myself might
perish in the coming trial, when the duty of communicating the facts to
you would devolve upon some one whom I would appoint