This was an agitation in itself, but the words--the words! I have never told them to mortal being, but I must tell them now; I remember them as I remember the look of my child's face when she was first put in my arms, the child--" She had underrated her strength.

She broke into a storm of weeping which shook to the very soul one of the two men who listened to her, though he made no move to comfort her or allay it.

The alienation thus expressed produced its effect, and, stricken deeper than the fount of tears, she suddenly choked back every sob and took up the thread of her narrative with the calmness born of despair, "These were the words, these and no others: "'If my niece will break all ties and come to me completely unhampered, she may hope to find a permanent home in my house and a close hold upon my affections.
IRA T.HOUGHTALING.' "Unhampered! with the marriage-vow scarcely cold on my lips! Without tie! and a husband waiting below to take me to his home on the hillside--a hillside so bare and bleak that the sight of it had sent a shudder to my heart as the wedding ring touched my finger.

The irony of the situation was more than I could endure, and alone, with my eyes fixed on the comfortless heavens, showing gray and cold through the narrow panes of my windows, I sank to the floor insensible.
"When I came to myself I was still alone, and the twilight a little more pronounced than when my misery had turned it to blackest midnight.
Rising, I read that letter again, and, plainly as the acknowledgment betrays the selfishness lying at the basis of my character, the temptation which thereupon seized me had never an instant of relenting or one conscientious scruple to combat it.

I simply, at that stage in my life and experience, could not do otherwise than I did.