“Meanwhile, in Millfield, Madame Verwest, as we will still call her, had told her story more fully to Mrs. Strong, while Anna, too, when she was better and could bear it, heard that the woman who from the first had been so kind to her in Chateau d’Or, was in reality her mother-in-law, and the grandmother of the little boy Arthur. Like poor Agatha Wynde she had been lured from her place in Boston, where she was employed in a straw shop. The man, who gave his name to her as Stevens, was an Englishman, and rich, and she went with him trustingly and honorably, as she believed, until the dreadful day when she found how she had been deceived. Even then she loved him and clung to her child, whom she was allowed to care for on condition that she passed as his nurse or foster-mother, and to this promise she held for many years, during which time Haverleigh died and left by will all his fortune to his son, except a thousand pounds bequeathed to the wretched woman who stood by him when he died; and when, selfish to the last, he said: ‘Don’t let the boy know the story of his birth. Let him think that Mabel was his mother,’ she answered him, ‘I will,’ and bore her secret bravely, and cared for the boy, and was a very slave to do his wishes, because of the love she bore him. “Whatever opinion he might have had of her, her influence over him was great, and he really seemed to have a genuine affection for her as the only mother he had ever known, and would never suffer her to leave his service, as he called it. He paid her well, told her most of his plans, counseled with her often, and at times evinced for her a liking and respect very dear to the woman who longed so much to fall upon his neck and claim him as her son. She had been with him in Scotland, and London, and Paris, and at last, six years before his marriage with Anna, had gone with him to Chateau d’Or, which he had just bought, and where for weeks he held a high carnival with his wild, dissipated friends. The quiet and seclusion of the place just suited his mother, who at his request had before leaving Paris, taken the name of Madame Verwest. “Up to that time she had been Mrs. Stevens, for she clung to the name she once believed to be her own, but it pleased her son to have her Madame Verwest, and a Frenchwoman, so a Frenchwoman she was; and because she liked the chateau so much he permitted her to stay there in charge of his servants, who held her in great esteem. The isolated position of the chateau was just suited to some of Haverleigh’s nefarious schemes, and poor Agatha Wynde was not the first young girl who had been immured in its walls. A fair-haired German from Munich, and a dark-eyed Italian from Verona had been hidden there for months until the search for them by their grief-stricken friends was over. When poor Agatha came there she had been so fair, so sweet, and so confiding, that Madame Verwest had taken the erring, repentant girl into her heart, and loved her like a mother.