tine for the moment into gladness and cordiality.

"Depend upon it, he will be pleased notwithstanding to find you even a
better bargain than he expected." Laura took Valentine's hand when he
said this, and laid it against her cheek. "What's his name, Laura?"

"His name is Swan."

Thereupon the whole story came out, told from Laura's point of view, but
with moderate fairness.

Valentine was surprised; but when he had seen the letters and discovered
that the usually vacillating Laura had quite made up her mind to sail to
New York, he determined that his help and sanction should enable her to
do so in the most desirable and respectable fashion. Besides, how
convenient for him, and how speedy a release from all responsibility
about her! Of course he remembered this, and when Laura heard him call
her lover "Don Josef," she thought it a delightful and romantic name.

But Mrs. Peter Melcombe was angry when Laura told her that Joseph had
written again, and that Valentine knew all and meant to help her. She
burst into tears. "Considering all I have suffered," she said, "in
consequence of that young man's behaviour, I wonder you have not more
feeling than to have anything to say to him. Humanly speaking, he is the
cause of all my misfortunes; but for him, I might have been mistress of
Melcombe still, and my poor darling, my only delight, might have been
well and happy."

Laura made no reply, but she repeated the conversation afterwards to
Valentine with hesitating compunction, and a humble hope that he would
put a more favourable construction on her conduct than Amelia had done.

"Humanly speaking," repeated Valentine with bitterness, "I suppose, then,
she wishes to insinuate that God ordained the child's death, and she had
nothing to do with it?"

"She behaved with beautiful submission," urged Laura.

"I dare say! but the child had been given over to her absolute control,
and she actually had a warning sent to her, so that she knew that it was
running a risk to take him into heat, and hurry, and to unwholesome
food. She chose to run the risk. She is a foolish, heartless woman. If
she says anything to me, I shall tell her that I think so."

"I feel all the more bitter about it," he muttered to himself, "because
I have done the same thing."

But Mrs. Melcombe said nothing, she contented herself with having made
Laura uncomfortable by her tears, and as the days and weeks of her visit
at Melcombe went on she naturally c