I hastened to interrupt her. I was agitated. It seemed to me that I owed her an apology.
"I'm afraid I acted very thoughtlessly in all that," I stammered. "Pray forgive me, madam; I had I need say it?—no idea—"
She started. A shiver ran through her enfeebled frame, and on the breath of an irrepressible sob she cried:
"Oh, sir! for pity's sake do not speak to me like that!"
She had fallen into a passionate fit of weeping, and I could find no words to soothe her. For a moment, I wished myself anywhere away from that wretched lodging in Stangate; but I was fascinated, held by the unseeable bonds of an unmasterable sympathy.
"Pray forgive me, sir; I am in a highly nervous condition, and unable at moments to put a proper restraint upon my feelings," she said, as soon as she had recovered a certain degree of calmness. "I have gone through great troubles—have great troubles still before me, in which my poor boy has had, and must still have, his share. For your kindness of intention towards him, no gratitude can be greater than ours; but, for that reason, I wish you know who and to what are the persons you are willing to benefit."
"For pity's sake do not speak to me like that!"
She dried her eyes, and her resolution seemed to take courage as she spoke:
"You already know—a word which you have spoken has told me—that I and my boy have known better days; before you think further of befriending us, it is right that you should know why you find us in the state in which you now see us: it is right, on every account, that you should be thoroughly informed how our present misery has come upon us, and what it really is. My boy is the son of a convict, now undergoing penal servitude at Dartmoor; he knows this, God help him! and it is this which he had not the courage to tell you, when you asked him what reference as to character he could give you."
I was startled by this wholly unlooked-for revelation, and I was conscious of being quite unable to conceal from her the painful surprise it had caused me.
"That my poor boy has no share in his father's guilt I need not say," she went on; "but the world, in its wisdom, or in its heedlessness of strict right, includes him in his father's punishment by branding him with the stigma of 'convict's son,' so warning all men to be specially on their guard against trusting him. That it should be so is unjust, cruel; but the unhappy ones on whom this injustice falls only add a misery the more to their load by denunciations that can bring them no remedy."
I confess—to my shame, perhaps—that in my agitation I did not know what reply to make to what she had said; not that I for an instant disagreed with her view of the hardship of her son's case.
"Oh, sir!" she continued, "if I could tell you the whole story, you would see that the position of my poor boy is a specially hard one. When he was born, the life before him was as fair and promising as
