Susan showed her cousin this letter, and told him how, after receiving it, her mind had almost given way under the burden of her great agony. Then it was that she had gone to Mrs. Burfield, and had written to her father a long letter, telling him something of her story, but not all; appealing piteously to the only friend to whom she could appeal; for faithful Frank was far away in some unknown country. She told her cousin how she had waited, at first with a faint sickly hope, then with a blank despair, for some answer from the father to whom she had appealed. But none came; and when her little stock of money had sunk to its lowest ebb, she left the dull quiet of Coltonslough to begin a weary, lonely struggle for bread, which had endured, without one ray of sunlight to illumine its blank misery, until the summer Sunday afternoon on which Francis Tredethlyn found her sitting in the nurse’s cottage with her boy in her arms. It was so sad a story, and so sadly common, that there is little need to dwell upon the unvarnished record of a woman’s battle with poverty in the heart of a great city. “Perhaps I ought to think myself very happy, Francis,” Susan said when she had told her story; “for I was always able to pay the nurse somehow for her care of my darling; and the deadly fear of not being able to do _that_ was the worst trouble I knew in all that dreary time. I have been face to face with starvation, Frank, very often within the last two years; but it is not so terrible, when one is used to it. The help always came at last, and some friendly hand, so unexpected that it might have dropped down from heaven, has often come between me and despair. I have sometimes thought that bitter struggle for my daily bread was only a blessing in disguise, for it kept me from brooding upon my great sorrow; it sometimes shut from me the thought of Robert’s cruelty and my own disgrace.” “Disgrace!” cried the Cornishman; “no, Susan, there is no shadow of disgrace upon you except the disgrace of being united to a scoundrel and a liar. The marriage before the registrar was a _bonâ fide_ marriage, as binding as if it had been performed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.”