'When this letter reaches you, I shall be no more; and however I may hitherto have offended you, I shall then be able to offend you no longer; and that child, whom you bound yourself by oath never to see or forgive but on the most cruel of conditions while living, dead you may perhaps deign to receive to your pardon and your love.--Nay, my heart tells me that you will do more,--that you will transfer the love which you once felt for me, to my poor helpless orphan; and in full confidence that you will be this indulgent, I bequeath her to you with my dying breath.--O! look on her, my mother, nor shrink from her with disgust, although you see in her my features; but rather rejoice in the resemblance, and fancy that I am restored to you pure, happy, and beloved as I once was.--Yes, yes,--it will be so: I have known a great deal of sorrow--let me then indulge the little ray of pleasure that breaks in upon me when I think that you will not resist my dying prayer, but bestow on my child the long arrears of tenderness due to me. 'Yes, yes, you will receive, you will be kind to her; and by so doing you will make me ample amends for all the sorrow which your harshness caused me when we met last.--That was a dreadful day! How you frowned on me! I did not think you could have frowned so dreadfully--but then I was uninjured by affliction, unaltered by illness. Were you to see me now, you would not have the heart to frown on me: and yet my letters being repeatedly returned, and even the last unnoticed and unanswered, though it told you that even on your own conditions I could now claim your pardon, for that I had been "wretched in love," and had experienced "the anguish of being forsaken, despised, and disgraced in the eye of the world," proves but too surely that the bitterness of resentment is not yet passed!--But on my _death-bed_ you promised to see and forgive me--_and I am there, my mother_!! Yet will I not claim that promise;--I will not weaken, by directing it towards myself, the burst of sorrow, of too late regret, of self-upbraidings, and long-restrained affection, which must be directed towards my child when I am not alive to profit by it. No:--though I would give worlds to embrace you once more, for the sake of my child I resign the gratification.