only one to blame; and now that the punishment
must come, I will not whine over my
fate, nor swear I was ill-used innocence. I
have been mad, reckless, headstrong, and
unprincipled—I will not add unmanly
cowardice to the list."

There was something in his tone which
went to my heart. Had he cowered or
whined, I should have left him to his fate;
but the indomitable manhood with which he
fronted his fate—sick, ill, deserted, as he
was—filled me with an admiration that
stood somewhat instead of my old love. I
felt my eyelids droop over my swollen eyes.
I rose from my chair—not passionately, and
yet with some irrepressible signs of
emotion—I laid my hand on his shoulder, and
said (O! how I tried to steady my faltering
voice, and how I failed!):

"I will not let you suffer, Derwent!
Tomorrow before noon this fearful evidence
against you shall be cancelled and destroyed.
Sleep in peace—you have still a mother for
your hour of need."

"God bless you, mother! " cried Derwent,
flinging his wasted arms round me, and burying
his face in my bosom; and, "O, you have
something of a mother's heart in you, after
all," said the woman, in a softened voice,
passing her coarse hand caressingly over my
shoulders. But through all the fur and velvet
of my dress I felt her touch, like a repelling
magnet, and shivered. She took her hand
away, more sadly I fancied than insolently;
and I felt sorry that I had allowed my
repugnance to be seen.

"Ah, mother!" said Derwent, "you and I
have been unfairly matched. I needed a
freer life than that which you gave me when
under your control, and the consequence was,
what it always is, that, when I got my
liberty, I carried it into licence. And licence
leads to sin, mother, and sin to crime. It is
a fatal union, but an inevitable one. If it
had not been for Melly here, I should have
been utterly lost; but she saved me when
almost too late though, by giving me
something to love and live for. She is not of your
station, mother," continued Derwent, while
the woman laughed, and chimed in with
"Thank God, no! I am no cold lady." "But
she has a heart that would do honour to a
throne, and a power of love that your mother
ought to envy. I was glad to make my wife of
one who dared be natural and dared be free."

"I am glad, Derwent, that you are
contented with your choice," said I coldly, for I
could not feign pleasure or participation;
"our lives are too far sundered now to make
your surroundings matters of much
consequence to me. You have made your own
life; and, be it ill or well, little of its
shadow or sunshine can fall upon me."

"O, mother!" said poor Derwent, bursting
into tears, "be, for once, good and loving to
me. I am weak and broken now, and you do not
know how I have longed—hungered, mother—
for your voice and words; could they be only
more loving and more kindly than they used to
be. O, mother! if you had been softer to me;
if you had drawn me to you and made yourself
my friend, not only my monitress; if you had
been more the woman, and less the mere
abstract principle, you might have saved me
from all that has befallen me. God knows, I
do not mean to reproach you," he added,
passionately, "still less to throw on you the
responsibility for sins which I alone ought to
bear. You followed the instincts of your own
nature; and, if that nature did not accord
with the needs of mine, that was not your
fault, only my misfortune," he added, with a
faint attempt at his old wild levity, but failing
as once before, and falling to broken,
child-like, yet not coward weeping again.

And something broke in me too. My pride
fell from me, like ice under the breath of
summer, and I took my son to my heart as I
had never taken him since he had lain cradled
there in childhood. His wife too—the artist's
model, the low-born daughter ot a day
labourer, the woman whose antecedents I knew
and felt would not bear close scrutiny—even
she I suffered to kiss my cheek, and checked
the shiver of disgust while she did so.

But do not think that I am one of those
lying pretences of instantaneous conversion.
I did all for my boy that I promised. I
redeemed his forged bill; I sold my estate,
and established him in comfort and respectability.
But—that done, and done with iron
nerves and unfeeling heart throughout—I
wrote him an adieu for ever, changed my
name, and left the country, never to return.
I could not live in England under the altered
conditions of fortune and my child's social
retrogression—I, who had held my head so
high, who had worn the immaculate ermine
with never a stain on its whiteness—I could
not stay to be the scorn where I had so long
been the envy of my circle. No, the pride
which the excitement of passion had been
able to meet could not be destroyed. What I
was then I must still continue to be. My nature
was not one either to change or to bend. I
had never been able to contemplate disgrace
with philosophy. In a country where I shall
not be known, and under an assumed name, I
may once more walk with my former dignity.
If lower, according to our ideas, in social
surroundings, at the least I shall be untouched
in moral pride. No one there, can point at
me as the mother of a possible felon; no one
there, can say that a false education bore fatal
fruit, and that pride and exclusiveness
produced degradation and ruin.