“My dearest Garnet! my love! my love! you shall go an honorable and an honored bride to your husband’s home. One whom I will take to my bosom thus—is a worthy match for any man. You should have been my own daughter, Garnet, but that I was cheated out of you; but I claim you now. You are my husband’s child, and the express image of his person; therefore you should have been my child; therefore I claim you now to be my child of right! I loved your father, Garnet! I love you! Believe me! Do not cover your face, and turn it from me. Let me kiss you. Do not grieve so.” “Grieve!” exclaimed the sinking girl, in a voice of anguish; “I do not grieve, lady! I die! Grieve! Oh, look you, madam! If I had suffered the loss of friends by death, or what is worse, by treachery; if I were miserably poor, ill, and abandoned; if I were dying of disease, want, and neglect; if I were misjudged, slandered, and persecuted; if I were unjustly charged, falsely imprisoned, and innocently doomed to death; if I were suffering any other anguish of mind, or agony of body, then I might grieve—but now! now! that I know myself a living, breathing monument of guilt!” A terrible shudder shook her frame and arrested her speech—her form collapsed and sank more than before—and it was in a dying voice she resumed: “Now that I know myself infected by worse than leprosy”—she paused and looked at herself from head to foot; she stretched forth her beautiful brown arm, frosted with pearls and diamonds, and surveyed it; she gathered up the lurid ringlets of her dark hair and gazed on them; then, dropping her arms wearily, she continued—“I was not so vain as grateful for my beauty. But now! oh, God! to think that every atom of flesh, and every drop of blood, and every nerve and vein to my heart’s core is pervaded, permeated with sin and reproach! sin and reproach! Oh, God! oh, God, quickly take back the soul Thou didst send into this shape of sin!” Once more her form cowered, crushed beneath the overwhelming weight of ignominy. She tottered and must have fallen to the floor, but that Elsie sprang and aided her mother in supporting her to a sofa near. “I declare,” exclaimed Elsie, in her positive manner, “there should have been no concealment; she should have grown up with the knowledge of her parentage!” “Oh-h-h! doubtless,” murmured the nearly dying girl, “oh, doubtless they should have told me of my birth! And then my soul would have grown up familiarized with infamy, until it became as base as its proscribed dwelling-place!” “But,” said Elsie, in her calm way, “is it possible you never suspected this? Is it possible that, when you came home from school, with all your faculties alive and keen, you could have looked upon my father’s portrait, and looked upon your own reflection in the glass, and not be struck by the resemblance, the identity of the two faces? Is it possible that you did not suspect?”