"At last I tore the string off the packet, and there fell out a letter and two small pictures--daguerreotypes, such as they used in those days to take on silvered plates--one of them a picture of her mother, the only thing she had taken away with her from her home, the other a young man whose face I had great difficulty in recalling. "The letter had been written several years before. Only in case of her death was it to come into my hands, she wrote in the very first lines. She had always been a proud child, and guilt and want and her sad life had not changed her. Yet there was a loving, tender tone in her words, a spirit of parting that softens even the hardest and most bitter natures; and as I read her simple confession, in which she accused herself of having robbed me of my happiness and ruined my life--of having offended me beyond forgiveness--it seemed as if my heart would burst. She could never prevail upon herself to return to me; at first from fear that I would renounce her a second time, and later, because she did not want to become a fresh burden to me. She knew that I had taken another name, and was living in the strictest seclusion. If she should suddenly appear with her child, it might not be convenient for me. But, when she should be no more--and this must be soon, for her lungs grew weaker every day--she begged me not to let the child suffer for the wrong her mother had done me. It was a good child, unspoiled as yet, but with little sense and very giddy. She needed a father's hand to guide her through her years of danger. She had appealed in vain to the child's father in the first years after his desertion of her. But, when no answer came, she had taken an oath that he should be dead to her forever. She had found no difficulty in keeping it, for she hated him now as much as she had once loved him. "For the child's sake she would now speak his name for the first time in eighteen years, so that if he should still be alive her father might call him to account and force him to make provision for his orphaned daughter. "And then followed a short word of farewell and the name of my child, and beside it in brackets that of her betrayer, which was also on the back of the daguerreotype, where, with his own hand, he had written some words of presentation to my daughter. "Give me a glass of water, my dear friend. My tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth, as if I had swallowed the dust of a whole graveyard! So--thank you--and now I shall soon have done. "For I shall take good care not to tell you how I have spent my time since the receipt of this legacy. I sometimes realized myself how much like a madman I must have looked as I rushed about the streets, at all hours of the day and night, peering under the hats of all the young girls, and forcing my way into the houses wherever I caught the faintest glimpse of red hair at the window."