No mind could develop healthily under the perpetual pressure of so hideous a secret; from her earliest childhood her impressions would be warped, her imagination darkened and her mental growth stunted.

It would be a great cruelty to tell her the truth; it was a great mercy to tell her the falsehood.

It was no selfish timidity which had prompted Mary Goddard, but a carefully weighed consideration for the welfare of her child.
If now, within these twenty-four hours, Nellie should discover who the poor tramp was, who had frightened her so much on the previous evening, all this would be at an end.

The child's life would be made desolate for ever.

She would never recover from the shock, and to injure lovely Nellie so bitterly would be worse to Mary Goddard than to be obliged to bear the sharpest suffering herself.