"Now, mother, this is what Bruce has discovered. First, that Sir Robert and Lady Marguerite Willoughby never had but one child, a fair and gentle young daughter, who mortally offended them by eloping with and marrying her drawing-master, a young man with the beauty of a Greek god and the humble station and sheer poverty which is too often the birthright of such beauty. For this offense she was disinherited and exiled forever from the presence of her haughty patrician father. It is said that the gentle mother would gladly have forgiven the erring child and made the best of the _mesalliance_, but Sir Robert's will being law, she had no choice but to abide by it. Secondly, that the disinherited daughter and her poor and handsome husband led a precarious existence in London for ten years, during which time four children were successively born to them and died; all this time the cruel parents of the willful daughter refusing her appeal for forgiveness. At the death of the last child the unfortunate but devoted pair concluded to try their fortune in America, whither they accordingly went, settling in New York. There another child was born to them, and fortune, long unpropitious, began to smile on the loving pair, when the sudden death of the husband left the timid young mother a widow and a stranger, with a fatherless child. The shock nearly unsettled her reason, and she waited only for the burial of her husband before she started for England with her baby, and on reaching here, presented herself, homeless, friendless, almost destitute, before her cruel parents, with an ill and fretful babe in her arms. They would have been inhuman to have turned her away. She was taken back to their home and hearts, but too late, for she was barely sane enough to give an incoherent account of her husband's death in America before her melancholy madness reached such a violent stage that they were compelled to remove her to a lunatic asylum, where she still remains, a hopeless maniac.