"Oh! my dearest child, can'st thou picture to thyself all the horrors that I have endured since first you were impressed and torn away from me again, after our short but happy meeting? I think it cannot be that you do so. For five years have I, with my wasted frame and ill health ever to contend against, pleaded your cause, worked hard to produce evidence of your birth, and was even so successful with the Marquis's aid as to defeat your vile uncle in the Irish courts and induce the Lords there to enrol you as Lord St. Amande. Yet, as I have thus striven, think of what else I have had to fight against. That most abhorred and execrable villain, Wolfe Considine, has thrown away the mask--if he ever wore it--and has now for two or three years boldly said--God! how can I write the words?--that when your erring father was petitioning the House of Lords for a divorce I was his, Considine's, friend, and that you are his son." The paper shook in my loved one's hands as he read these words, and he muttered, "Considine, Considine, if ever you come within the point of my sword it shall go hard with you," and then went on with the perusal of the letter: "That no one believes him--for none do so--matters not. The odium is still the same, and there are some in existence who remember how, at Bath and Tunbridge Wells, ere I had met your father, the wretch persecuted me with his attentions, which I loathed. Also, I remember that, on my becoming affianced to your father, he swore that I should rue it and regret it on my knees, even though he had to wait twenty years for his revenge. Alas! alas! I have rued it and regretted it again and again, though not as he intended. Yet, my child, and only one, if I could but see you properly acknowledged as the Marquis's heir and as such accepted, then would I forget my rue, then could I die happy--the end is not far off now. But ere that end comes, oh! my child, my child of many tears, come back to me, I beseech you. Let me once more clasp you to my arms and let me hear your kinsman proclaim you as his successor. It is for that I wait, for that I long unceasingly." There was more in her letter saying, amongst other things, how Mr. Quin, whom afterwards I came to know and to respect most deeply, never slackened in his watchfulness over her; of how he was always in attendance on her and what services he performed for her. But what he had read was sufficient. "You must go to England, Gerald," I said; "at all costs, you must go. Will the Admiral give you leave?" He laughed aloud at this, saying: "Will the Admiral give me leave? Why, Joice, Sir Chaloner Ogle sailed a month ago, leaving me ere he went his consent to my being absent as long as necessary on urgent private affairs. He knows well how I stand, and wishes me well, too. And, dear heart, as you say, I must go--only I will not go alone."