marry the man you love, I would willingly lay down my life; but it cannot be done. The only and best reparation I can offer is to promise, as I do now most faithfully, to wipe you out of my heart, so that you may be free from me for ever.' How fair those words sound--how self-sacrificing--how manly! What a noble nature do they display! Would it be believed that while this letter was on its way to the wife whom he was about to desert--to the wife whom he had most cruelly wronged, and most shamefully betrayed--the man who wrote it was entering the house where the woman lived who had been his companion in former years? The next morning you left. Two days afterwards, the woman followed you to London. Is anything more wanted to complete the shameful story? Had I brought disgrace upon you, or had you brought it upon me? A noble reparation, indeed, did you make to me! You may ask how it was that I discovered your visit to the woman. My father and my cousin saw you coming from the house, where doubtless you had completed all your arrangements, and left your final instructions. My cousin it was who told me. 'Now,' he said, 'do you believe that he is false?' 'Yes,' I answered; 'I am convinced of it' What followed? Remember it is your dead wife who is speaking to you, and do not dare, for your soul's sake, to add to your cruelty by doubting what she says. My cousin Ralph then began to speak again of his own selfish passion, and I bade him never to presume to address me again. From that day I never saw him; some little while afterwards my father told me he had gone abroad, but we never heard from him. We remained--my father and I--for a few weeks after your departure, and then my father's health suddenly broke down. In one thing you had most completely succeeded; you had blackened my name as well as your own. Innocent as I was, wronged as I was, I think no one in my native place pitied me. Persons who had once respected me avoided me, or slighted me. Day by day the torture of living in this atmosphere of injustice grew until it was unbearable; and when my father broke down, I took him with me into a strange place, where neither of us was known, and where I hoped by carefully husbanding our small means, and by employing some hours of the day in needlework, to be enabled to live quietly, if not in peace. There was another reason why I was anxious to leave--a reason which you will now learn for a certainty for the first time. I was about to become a mother.