"By the tenor of these succeeding ones from Sir Reginald and his priest." She opened her desk, and gave me two letters from my father to her. They were, as she described them, repentant, and spoke most honourably and most fondly of my deceased mother--praying Mrs Causand most earnestly to tell him of the happiness and the whereabouts of his wife. "And you did, of course." "No, Ralph, I did not--look at the dates. It was a fortnight after these arrived before I returned home. I weep even now when I think of it--three days before I returned your mother had died, almost suddenly." "Ah, true, true!" said I, mournfully. But, a sudden pang of agony seizing my inmost heart, I suddenly started up, and, seizing her roughly by the hand, I said, sternly: "Look me in the face, Madam--do you see any resemblance there to my poor, poor mother?" "Oh, very, very great--but why this violence?" "Because I now understand the villainy that caused her death. Your son murdered her--see in me her reproachful countenance--oh, Mrs Causand, you and yours have been the bane, the ruin of me and mine." "What do you mean by those horrible words? Ralph, beware, or you will yourself commit a dastardly murder upon me, even as you stand there." "Mrs Causand, I will be calm. I see it all. With the first letter of Sir Reginald in his hand, he went to Stickenham; and, with the murderous intent strong in his black bosom, he branded my mother with bigamy, incensed the weak Frenchman against her, and, in twenty-four hours, did the mortal work that years of injustice and injury could not effect." "Good God, it must be so!--Ralph, I do not ask you to forgive him--but pity his poor suffering mother--he has broken my heart--not, Ralph, in the mystical, but in the actual, the physical sense. In the very hour in which I returned home, I found a warrant had been issued for his apprehension as a housebreaker; and the stony-hearted reprobate had the cruelty to insult his mother by a letter glorying in the fact, at the same time demanding a thousand pounds for his secrecy and the papers that he had stolen. The shock was too much for me. I had an attack, a fit--I know not what--I fell senseless to the earth--my heart has never since beaten healthfully. Oh, perhaps, after all, it would be a happiness for me to die!--Poor Elizabeth--my more than sister, my friend!" "But why do I waste my time here?" said I, starting up, and seizing my hat. "The reptile is at work. Where lives Sir Reginald?--my demon-- like double may be there before me. He may personate me long enough to kill my father and rifle his hoards. I must away--but, ere I go, know that, with these abstracted papers, he sought me in the West Indies, cheated me out of my name on my return to England, and, finally, waylaid and attempted, with a low accomplice, to assassinate me on my return from Stickenham." "God of Heaven, let me die!--he could never have been son of mine--let me know the horrid particulars."