y decided upon; and
while I deliberated, a letter arrived from England. Mr. Strafford, on
hearing of the scene which ended in your illness, had carried out an
idea which, he afterwards told me, he had long entertained, and written
to my cousin George. The letter which now arrived was in answer to this,
though it contained an enclosure for me. My appeal to my father had been
made just in time; it reached him on his deathbed, and he forgave me. He
did more than that; he altered, at the very last, a will made many years
before, and left me an equal sum to that I had before inherited from my
mother, but with the condition that I should never return to England.
You understand now why, loving the dear old country as I still do, I
have always told you I should never see it again--to do so would be to
forfeit all our living, and more even than that, it would be to disobey
my father's last command. My cousin's note was as kind and brotherly as
if he had never had the least reason to complain of me. He told me that
he had married some years before a good woman who, I have since thought,
might have been his first choice if regard for my father's wishes had
not influenced him. At any rate, they were and, I hope, still are happy
together, filling my father and mother's places in the old home.

"These letters made my way clearer. It was settled that I should take
advantage of Christian's absence (for he had again left the island) to
remove with you to the most secure hiding-place we could find, and as a
large town always offers the best means of concealment, we decided upon
Montreal. So after a residence of six years on the island, I left it at
last, carrying you with me and calling myself a widow. It was then that
I took the name of Costello. It was my mother's family name, and is
really, as you have always supposed, Spanish--my great-grandfather
having been a Spaniard. I gave you the name at your baptism, so that it
is really yours, though not mine.

"For six months we remained in Montreal; but I had been so long used to
the silence and free air of the island that my health failed in the
noisy town. I was seized with a terror of dying, and leaving you
unprotected, and therefore determined to try whether I could not remain
concealed equally well in the country. A chance made me think of this
neighbourhood, which, though rather too near my old home, was then very
retired, and not inhabited at all by Indians. I came up, found this
pl