"I can't bear it," I read, "to know that I have no longer the first place, that another woman is nearer to him than I. To feel that the first of his love is given to a stranger! The best of his heart is hers! Who is she? What right had she to come between us? What has she done for him compared to me? Ever since he was first put in my arms, ever since I heard him cry the first time after the awful pain and anguish of deliverance, he has been mine! Mine! Mine! And she has taken him! Oh, God, pity me! I cannot give him up and live! He must not bring her here. I shall never like her! I hate her! I do not believe she is--Oh, how wicked I am! And he will be so happy while I suffer! I'm glad he will be happy--but it kills me. Thank God! it will not be for long. I don't want to see her. Pity me, my Saviour! You had a mother! I am an old, lonely, dying woman. Mercy, mercy! I don't want to see him--either--that I should write it--my son! with a light in his eyes and love in his voice for another woman. I shall die now. Perhaps I may find comfort then. But I shall never forget. He wrote about her on seven pages of his letter, and one was enough for me. Oh, Sonny Boy, to lose you, to--your little old mother is breaking her heart! Be assured of one thing, my son, I love you and I have loved you better than any one in the whole world will ever love you"--these were the words she had whispered to me on her death-bed--"no matter how much joy you may have, how much happiness, no matter where you may go, whom you may meet, what they may say, no one in this world will ever love you as I have. No one will ever think of you as your mother." That was all. And I'm afraid it was true. "There is none In all this cold and hollow world, no fount Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within A mother's heart." I sat there in the gray of the morning with the open book in my hand. She had told me to give the volumes to George when he returned, and I could not--if I desired to do so--disregard her wish; yet to lay before him the sorrow, the regret, the sadness of that last entry: to leave with him that final thought of his mother, to cloud his wedded life with a suspicion which I knew he could never dispel, that his joy had been her death, his marriage had broken her heart--I could not do it! Still, to withhold from that boy the last words of his mother--it did not seem right! What did I do? you ask. Well, with a horribly guilty feeling, I cut the last leaf containing those terribly piteous words out of the diary. I did it carefully so that he would never know that anything had been taken away. I felt like a thief all the time, somehow.