"Mother, Mother!" I cried--while a horrid suspicion darted through, my brain--"what is the meaning of this strange conduct, and still stranger words? In the name of Heaven! what was Squire Carlos to you?" "Noah, he was your father!" returned my mother, slowly and solemnly. "I need not tell you what he was to me." Had she stabbed me with a red-hot knife, the effect would have been less painful. "My father!" I cried, with a yell of agony, as I sank down, stunned with horror, at her feet. "Mother!--Mother! for my sake--for your own sake, recal those dreadful words!" Some minutes elapsed before I again awoke to the consciousness of my terrible guilt. My crime appeared to me in a new aspect--an aspect that froze my soul, and iced the warm stream of my young blood with despair. I had been excited--agitated--almost maddened, with the certainty of being a murderer; but there was something of human passion in those tumultuous feelings. But the certainty that I was not only a murderer, but a parricide,--had killed my own father for the sake of a few hundred pounds, which I now knew that I could never enjoy, chilled me into a stupid, hardened apathy. There could be no forgiveness for a crime like mine, neither in this world--nor in the world to come. I could have cursed my wretched mother for having so long concealed from me an important fact, which, if known, had saved the life of her worthless paramour. Her silence might have been the effect of shame. But no--when I recalled the frequency of Mr. Carlos's visits, his uniform kindness to me, the very last conversation I held with him, and the dark hints that from time to time Bill Martin had so insultingly thrown out, I felt convinced that she had all along been living with him on terms of abandoned intimacy, and that her crime had been the parent of my own. Yet, in spite of these bitter recriminations, when I raised my eyes to her, and met her sad, pleading, tearful glance, all my love for her returned, and, clasping her knees, as I still sat upon the ground at her feet, I said, "Mother, why did you keep this guilty secret from me for so many years? I should have felt and acted very differently towards that unhappy man, if I had known that he was my father." "Noah, it is hard to acknowledge one's sin to one's own child. It is a sin, however, that I have been bitterly punished for committing." "But you still continued to live on those terms with him?" "Alas! Noah, I loved him!" She threw her apron over her head, and sobbed as if her heart would burst. "I will show you, Mother, how one crime produces another," I was about to say, when a loud rap at the door recalled my self-possession; and I was summoned to attend the sitting of the magistrates, and tell all I knew about the murder. CHAPTER XX. A LAST LOOK AT OLD FRIENDS.