“You lie!” I exclaimed passionately. This tipsy, dissipated, coarse-looking creature, the woman who bore me, and whom I had believed to be lying in her grave for sixteen years and more. Was it wonderful that at the first blush my mind utterly refused to credit it? The angry accusation I have recorded had barely left my lips, when I looked up and saw _my mother_--the woman who had come as an angel of light into my father’s darkened home, and watched over me with the tenderest affection since--standing on the threshold, pale and peaceful in her mourning garb, as the Spirit of Death itself. “Mother! say it is not true,” I cried as I turned towards her. “Oh, Charlie, my darling boy! my brave, good son! Be quiet! bear it like a man; but it _is_ true!” “This--this woman was my father’s _wife!_” “She was!” “And _you_, mother!” I exclaimed in agony. “I was only the woman that he loved, Charlie,” she answered, with downcast eyes. “You must think no higher of me than that!” “I think the very highest of you that I can. You were my father’s loving companion and friend for years: you saved his life and his reason! You were _his_ true, true wife, and _my_ mother. I shall never think of you in any lower light.” My emotion had found vent in tears by that time. It was all so new and so horrible to believe, and my mother’s hand rested fondly on my bowed head. Then that other woman, whose existence I can never recall without a shudder, seized her hateful opportunity, and levelled the most virulent abuse at my poor martyr mother’s head. Words, such as I had never heard from a female before, rained thickly from her lips, until I lost sight of my own grief in my indignation at the shower of inuendoes which were being hurled at the person dearest to me of all the world. “Be silent,” I said in a loud authoritative voice. “Were you twenty times my mother I would not permit you to speak as you are speaking now. If it is true that you were my father’s wife, why were you not in your proper place, instead of leaving your lawful duties to another?” “Oh! madam here can answer that question better than myself. She knows well enough there was no room left for me where she was.” “Untrue!” murmured my mother, but without any anger. “I would have shielded your character from your boy’s censure, as I have done for so long, but justice to the dead compels me to speak. You left this home desolate for many miserable years before I entered it. You deserted your child in his infancy, but your husband had so good and forgiving a heart that, when you cried to him for pardon, he took you back again and condoned your great offence, and therefore, when you left him a second time, the law contained no remedy for his wrong. He was compelled to live on--alone--dishonoured and comfortless, whilst you--you can best tell your son what your life has been since.”