'Cytherea,' she said, 'listen to me before I die.
'A long time ago--more than thirty years ago--a young girl of seventeen was cruelly betrayed by her cousin, a wild officer of six-and-twenty. He went to India, and died.
'One night when that miserable girl had just arrived home with her parents from Germany, where her baby had been born, she took all the money she possessed, pinned it on her infant's bosom, together with a letter, stating, among other things, what she wished the child's Christian name to be; wrapped up the little thing, and walked with it to Clapham. Here, in a retired street, she selected a house.
She placed the child on the doorstep and knocked at the door, then ran away and watched. They took it up and carried it indoors.
'Now that her poor baby was gone, the girl blamed herself bitterly for cruelty towards it, and wished she had adopted her parents' counsel to secretly hire a nurse. She longed to see it. She didn't know what to do. She wrote in an assumed name to the woman who had taken it in, and asked her to meet the writer with the infant at certain places she named. These were hotels or coffee-houses in Chelsea, Pimlico, or Hammersmith. The woman, being well paid, always came, and asked no questions. At one meeting--at an inn in Hammersmith--she made her appearance without the child, and told the girl it was so ill that it would not live through the night. The news, and fatigue, brought on a fainting-fit . . .' Miss Aldclyffe's sobs choked her utterance, and she became painfully agitated. Cytherea, pale and amazed at what she heard, wept for her, bent over her, and begged her not to go on speaking.
'Yes--I must,' she cried, between her sobs. 'I will--I must go on!
And I must tell yet more plainly! . . . you must hear it before I am gone, Cytherea.' The sympathizing and astonished girl sat down again.
'The name of the woman who had taken the child was _Manston_. She was the widow of a schoolmaster. She said she had adopted the child of a relation.
'Only one man ever found out who the mother was. He was the keeper of the inn in which she fainted, and his silence she has purchased ever since.
'A twelvemonth passed--fifteen months--and the saddened girl met a man at her father's house named Graye--your father, Cytherea, then unmarried. Ah, such a man! Inexperience now perceived what it was to be loved in spirit and in truth! But it was too late. Had he known her secret he would have cast her out. She withdrew from him by an effort, and pined.