nt on, for three months, and then one morning she was gone,
and I found a letter on her table for me, saying that she had been
married to him a week before, when she went out, as I thought, to spend
the day with a friend. She begged and prayed me to forgive her, and
said how miserable she had been, and that she could not say no to her
lover's pleadings.

"I wrote to the address she had given me, saying that she had well nigh
broken my heart. She knew that I had only refused my consent because it
would have seemed a dishonourable action, to allow your son to marry
her without your consent. She knew how hard it had been for me to do my
duty, when I saw her pining before my eyes, but I forgave her wholly,
and did not altogether blame her, seeing that it was the way of Nature
that young women, when they once took to loving, should put their
father altogether in the second place;

"It was hard to me to write that letter, for I longed to see her bonny
face again. But I thought it was my duty. I thought so then; but I
think, now, it was pride.

"From time to time she wrote to me. I learned that you still refused to
see your son, and I gathered, though she did not say much of this, that
things were going badly with them. At last, she wrote that her husband
was ill--very ill, she feared. He had, in vain, tried to get
employment. I don't think he was naturally strong, and the anxiety had
broken him down. Then I went up to London at once, and found them, in a
little room, without the necessaries of life. I brought them down home,
and nursed him for three months, till he died.

"A week later, Aggie was born. Ten days afterwards, I laid her mother
by the side of her father. No answer had come to the letters he had
written to you, while he had been ill, though in the later ones he had
told you that he was dying. So, I looked upon the child as mine.

"Things had gone badly with me. I had been able to take no lodgers,
while they were with me. I had got into debt, and even could I have
cleared myself, I could not well have kept the house on, without a
woman to look after it. I was restless, too, and longed to be moving
about. So I sold off the furniture, paid my debts, and laid by the
money that remained, for the child's use in the future.

"I had, some time before, met an old comrade travelling the country
with a show. I happened to meet him again, just as I was leaving, and
he told me the name of a man, in London, who sold such