She stooped to kiss her daughter, in whose mind there was no shadow of doubt that what her mother had told her was true. Her baby was dead, and though she mourned for it truly she knew that it was far better off in heaven than in that hospital, with only strangers to care for it; and gradually, as the days went by and she felt her strength and health coming back again, the sense of loss and pain which at first had weighed so heavily upon her, began to give way, and more than one of the lodgers in the house noticed and commented upon the great beauty of the young girl, whom they sometimes met upon the stairs or saw sitting by her window. They knew the grave woman dressed in widow’s weeds was Mrs. Fordham, and as the young girl was her daughter they naturally supposed her to be Miss Fordham, a mistake which the mother took no pains to rectify; while Edith, who had suffered so much, began to feel an utter inability to oppose her own will to that of her mother, and when the latter said to her, “It is not necessary for you to explain to others that your name is not Fordham,” she passively acquiesced: and thus none of the lodgers ever heard the name of Lyle, or dreamed of that grave across the sea at Schuyler Hill, or the dreary room in Dorset Street, and the scenes enacted there. All these were buried in the past, and there was nothing in the way of Mrs. Fordham’s plans, except, indeed, the means to carry them out. Once the mother had hoped much from her daughter’s voice, which was a fine contralto of great power and compass; but that hope was gone, for on the dreadful day when, with the fury of a tigress, Edith had invoked Heaven’s curse upon her mother if so much as a hair of baby’s head was harmed, it seemed as if a hand of iron had clutched her throat with a remorseless grasp, which had for a time deprived her of her powers of utterance, except in a hoarse whisper. At intervals, even now, she felt the grip of those fingers, and would start suddenly with a sense of suffocation, which soon passed away, and left her breathing free as ever. But the glorious voice did not come back, and though she sometimes sang some sweet, low song, her voice was very weak, and a musical education, so far as singing was concerned, was of course out of the question; but for all other branches the best of teachers were procured, and Edith, who possessed a fondness for books, progressed so rapidly as to astonish even herself, while her mother would have been perfectly content but for one little annoyance which haunted her continually, and which increased with every succeeding day. Her finances were fearfully low; nor did she know where aid was to come from.