o
comment on it, but continued her narrative as if no interruption had
taken place.

"Money took me to a new master; he was richer than the first; he bound
my heart to him by the profusion of his money. He was old and withered,
but his gold and silver reflected so brightly on his face, I came to
think him handsome; he was your father; you were born; after your birth
I think I even loved him. I urged him to marry me; he listened; he even
promised--yes, marriage and money--money--they were almost in my very
grasp. I was sure--sure--when he went to England to arrange some
business, he said; he wrote fondly for a while; I lived in an elysium;
money and an honorable marriage were my own. I had not one doubt; but he
ceased to write to me--all at once he ceased; had it been a gradual
drawing off, my brain would not have reeled as it did. At last, when
fear and anxiety had almost thrown me into a fever, a letter came. It
announced in a few words that your father was married to a young,
virtuous, and wealthy lady; he had settled a small annuity on me for
life, and never wished to see or hear from me again. A violent illness
seized me then; it was a kind of burning fever. All things around me
seemed to dazzle, and assume the form of gold and silver; I struggled
and writhed to grasp the illusion; they were forced to tie my hands--to
bind me down in my bed. I recovered at last, but I had grown all at once
old, withered, stricken in mind and body by that sickness. For a long
time--for years--I lived as if in a lingering dream; I had no keen
perceptions of life; my wishes had little energy; my thoughts were
confused and wandering; even the love of money and the want of money
failed to stir me into any kind of action. I have something of the same
kind of feeling still," she said, raising her hand to her head. "The
burning fever into which I was thrown when your father's love vanished
from me, is often here even yet, though its duration is brief; but it is
sufficient to make me incapable of any exertion by which I could make
money. I have trusted to you; I have hoped that you might be the means
of raising me from my poverty; I have long hoped to see the gold and
silver of your earning. I did not say much at first, when I saw you
turning a poet; I had heard that poetry was the sure high-road to
poverty, but I said little then. I was hardly able to judge and know
rightly what you should do when you commenced writing in your boyhood;
but