"But, over and above all this, there were circumstances in my own life which, when I called them to mind, compelled me in my own despite to lend a more favorable ear to Mrs. Drelincourt's entreaties. My husband was a bad and cruel man. (It is better you should know the truth, however painful it may be.) He was both a drunkard and a spendthrift, and something worse than either. He had deserted me months before you were born, leaving me all but penniless. "I neither knew where he was nor when to expect him back; and it was his return I dreaded more than anything else in the world. Could I have been sure that I should never see him again, I should have felt comparatively happy. But I might hear his knock at the door at any hour of the day or night, and the fear of it turned my life into a perpetual nightmare. Oh, I had good cause for being afraid of him! "Not to weary you, it will be enough to say that I finally gave way and yielded to Mrs. Drelincourt's entreaties. Of what it cost me to do so I will say nothing. "When Mrs. Drelincourt was well enough to leave the London hotel, at which she was an entire stranger, it was to go down to Wyvern Towers. It was at a little country station, at which she made a stoppage for the purpose, that you were given over into her charge. Our faithful servant; since dead, with whose services it was impossible to dispense, was our sole confidant in the affair. "For the next four years I lived as companion to an invalid lady, to whom some portion of my history was known, and who did not object to my passing under a fictitious name--the one by which I have ever since been known. At the end of that time Mrs. Drelincourt sent for me. "She was in a consumption, and was quite aware that her recovery was hopeless. She had grown to care for you as if you were her own child, and her object in sending for me was not merely that I might nurse her through her last illness, but that after she was gone I might have the permanent charge of you, at any rate for several years to come; nor did she rest satisfied till she had extracted a promise from her husband that her wishes in this respect should be faithfully observed by him. Me, two days before she died, she bound by a solemn promise that only under the most extreme circumstances would I ever reveal the true story of your parentage." In view of the amazing confession just made by the elder woman, mother and daughter found no lack of subjects to talk about, but it was not till an hour later that a new and, to her, very surprising thought struck Anna. "If you are my mother," she said, "and of course you are, then Felix cannot be my half brother?" "That is very true," replied Mrs. Jenwyn, with a faint smile. She had been waiting for Anna to make the discovery.