have been thinking since I have been sitting here—that you ought to know, of your own history, all I know. It is very little. Next to nothing.”
“Dear guardian,” I replied, “when you spoke to me before on that subject———”
“But, since then,” he gravely interposed, anticipating what I meant to say, “I have reflected that your having anything to ask me, and my having anything to tell you, are different considerations, Esther. It is perhaps my duty to impart to you the little I know.”
“If you think so, guardian, it is right.”
“I think so,” he returned, very gently, and kindly, and very distinctly. “My dear, I think so, now. If any real disadvantage can attach to your position, in the mind of any man or woman worth a thought, it is right that you, at least, of all the world should not magnify it to yourself, by having vague impressions of its nature.”
I sat down; and said, after a little effort to be as calm as I ought to be, “One of my earliest remembrances, guardian, is of these words. ‘Your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers. The time will come, and soon enough, when you will understand this better, and will feel it too, as no one save a woman can.k’” I had covered my face with my hands, in repeating the words; but I took them away now with a better kind of shame, I hope, and told him, that to him I owed the blessing that I had from my childhood to that hour never, never, never felt it. He put up his hand as if to stop me. I well knew that he was never to be thanked, and said no more.
“Nine years, my dear,” he said, after thinking for a little while, “have passed since I received a letter from a lady living in seclusion, written with a stern passion and power that rendered it unlike all other letters I have ever read. It was written to me (as it told me in so many words), perhaps, because it was the writer's idiosyncrasy to put that trust in me; perhaps, because it was mine to justify it. It told me of a child, an orphan girl then twelve years old, in some such cruel words as those which live in your remembrance. It told me that the writer had bred her in secresy from her birth, had blotted out all trace of her existence, and that if the writer were to die before the child became a woman, she would be left entirely friendless, nameless, and unknown. It asked me, to consider if I would, in that case, finish what the writer had begun?”
I listened in silence, and looked attentively at him.
“Your early recollection, my dear, will supply the gloomy medium through which all this was seen and expressed by the writer, and the distorted religion which clouded her mind with impressions of the need there was for the child to expiate an offence of which she was quite innocent. I felt concerned for the little creature, in her darkened life; and replied to the letter.”
I took his hand and kissed it.
“It laid the injunction on me that I should never propose to see the writer, who had long been estranged from all intercourse with the world, but who would see a confidential agent if I would appoint one. I accredited Mr. Kenge. The lady said, of her own accord, and not of his seeking, that her name was an assumed one. That she was, if there were any ties of blood in such a case, the child's aunt. That more than
