‘Cytherea?’ she faintly whispered the instant the door was closed. Cytherea clasped the lady’s weak hand, and sank beside her. Miss Aldclyffe whispered again. ‘They say I am certain to live; but I know that I am certainly going to die.’ ‘They know, I think, and hope.’ ‘I know best, but we’ll leave that. Cytherea--O Cytherea, can you forgive me!’ Her companion pressed her hand. ‘But you don’t know yet--you don’t know yet,’ the invalid murmured. ‘It is forgiveness for that misrepresentation to Edward Springrove that I implore, and for putting such force upon him--that which caused all the train of your innumerable ills!’ ‘I know all--all. And I do forgive you. Not in a hasty impulse that is revoked when coolness comes, but deliberately and sincerely: as I myself hope to be forgiven, I accord you my forgiveness now.’ Tears streamed from Miss Aldclyffe’s eyes, and mingled with those of her young companion, who could not restrain hers for sympathy. Expressions of strong attachment, interrupted by emotion, burst again and again from the broken-spirited woman. ‘But you don’t know my motive. O, if you only knew it, how you would pity me then!’ Cytherea did not break the pause which ensued, and the elder woman appeared now to nerve herself by a superhuman effort. She spoke on in a voice weak as a summer breeze, and full of intermission, and yet there pervaded it a steadiness of intention that seemed to demand firm tones to bear it out worthily. ‘Cytherea,’ she said, ‘listen to me before I die. ‘A long time ago--more than thirty years ago--a young girl of seventeen was cruelly betrayed by her cousin, a wild officer of six-and-twenty. He went to India, and died. ‘One night when that miserable girl had just arrived home with her parents from Germany, where her baby had been born, she took all the money she possessed, pinned it on her infant’s bosom, together with a letter, stating, among other things, what she wished the child’s Christian name to be; wrapped up the little thing, and walked with it to Clapham. Here, in a retired street, she selected a house. She placed the child on the doorstep and knocked at the door, then ran away and watched. They took it up and carried it indoors. ‘Now that her poor baby was gone, the girl blamed herself bitterly for cruelty towards it, and wished she had adopted her parents’ counsel to secretly hire a nurse. She longed to see it. She didn’t know what to do. She wrote in an assumed name to the woman who had taken it in, and asked her to meet the writer with the infant at certain places she named. These were hotels or coffee-houses in Chelsea, Pimlico, or Hammersmith. The woman, being well paid, always came, and asked no questions. At one meeting--at an inn in Hammersmith--she made her appearance without the child, and told the girl it was so ill that it would not live through the night. The news, and fatigue, brought on a fainting-fit....’