o letters of mine, nor did we
ever meet until, most unexpectedly, I met her in your house. My pride,
after her first refusals to see me, was too great to permit me to renew
my entreaties, and so I called her a flirt, and inconstant. I tried to
banish her remembrance from my heart--and I thought I had succeeded."

"Oh, my poor darling!" exclaimed Mrs. Clayton. "This accounts then for
her holding aloof from all her relations for so long a time, by which
means she estranged herself from many of them. She was working out her
penitence and deep remorse in solitary misery; and she would not even
let me share her confidence. But about the box, Mr. Laurence; what has
all this to do with the black box?"

"When I met her in your shrubbery the other day, and reproached her for
her desertion of me, insisting upon her giving me the reason of her
change of mind, she bade me follow her to her own apartment. There,
unlocking the box before you, she showed me its contents."

"And they are--?" inquired Mrs. Clayton, breathlessly.

"Would you like to see them?" he demanded, taking a key from his pocket.
"I have as much right to show them you as she would have had. But is
your love for her dead memory and reputation strong enough to insure
your eternal secrecy on the subject?"

"It is," said Bella Clayton, decidedly.

"This box," continued Mr. Laurence, applying the key he held to the lock
of the iron-clamped black trunk, "has accompanied my poor girl on all
her travels for the last two years. The dreadful secret of its contents
which she bore in silent, solitary misery all that time has been, I
believe, the ultimate cause of her death, by proving too heavy a burden
for the sensitive and proud spirit which was forced to endure the
knowledge of its shame. She was killed by her remorse. If you have
courage, Mrs. Clayton, for the sight, look at _this_--and pity the
feelings I must endure as I kneel here and look at it with you."

He threw back the lid and the topmost linen as he spoke, and Bella
Clayton pressed eagerly forward to see, carefully laid amidst withered
flowers and folds of cambric, the tiny skeleton of a new-born creature
whose angel was even then beholding the face of his Father in Heaven.

She covered her eyes with her clasped hands, no less to shut out the
sight than to catch the womanly tears which poured forth at it, and then
she cried between her sobs--

"Oh! my poor, poor Blanche, what must she not have suffered!