"For the first week I got on pretty well. The new life helped to divert my thoughts, and I tried to believe I could do well without my mother. But then the knowledge that I had done wrong, joined to a desperate mother-hunger, I can call it by no other word, took possession of me. I got to hate my aunt, who led a gay life. At last I could bear it no longer. I ran away. "I had just enough money in my pocket to take me to London; I had not one penny more. But I felt easy enough; I thought, I will go to our old home, and make it up with mother, and then it will be all right. So I spent my last, my very last shilling in a cab fare, and I gave the driver the old address. "As I got near the house, I began to wish I had not come. I was such an odd mixture; all made up of love and that terrible pride. However, my pride was to get a shock I little expected. "Strangers were in the old rooms; strangers who knew nothing whatever about my mother. I found that I had so set my heart against this marriage, that I had not even cared to inquire the name of the man my mother had married; so I had no clew to give anyone, no one could help me. I was only a child then, and I wandered away without one farthing, absolutely alone in the great world of London. "It drove me nearly wild to remember that my mother was really in the very same London, and I could not find her, and when I had got as far as a great bridge---I knew it was a bridge, for I saw the water running under it---I could bear my feelings no longer, and I just cried out like any little baby for my Mammie. "It was then, Cecile, that Mrs. Moseley found me. Oh! how good she was to me! She took me home and she gave me love, and my poor starved heart was a little satisfied. "Perhaps she and her husband could have helped me to find my mother. But again that demon pride got over me. I would not tell them my tale. I would acknowledge to no one that my mother had put another in my place; so all the time that I was really starving for one kiss from my own mother, I made believe that I did not care. "I used to go out every day and look for her as well as I could by myself, but of course I never got the slightest clew to where she lived; and I doubt then, that even if I had known, so contrary was I, that I would have gone to her. "Well, one day, who should come up to me, quite unexpectedly, but Aunt Fanny again. Oh! she was a bad, cruel woman, and she had a strange power over me. She talked very gently, and not a bit crossly, and she soon came around a poor, weak young thing like me; she praised my pretty face, and she roused my vanity and my pride, and at last she so worked on me, that she got me to do a mean and shameful thing--I was to go back to Paris with her, without ever even bidding the Moseleys good-by.