Chapter 15 - Page 2

income was barely enough to support his family: she could do nothing for me, and I could do nothing for myself. I wrote to my aunt at Glasgow, and received no answer. Starvation stared me in the face, when I saw in a newspaper an advertisement addressed to me by Mr. Van Brandt. He implored me to write to him; he declared that his life without me was too desolate to be endured; he solemnly promised that there should be no interruption to my tranquillity if I would return to him. If I had only had myself to think of, I would have begged my bread in the streets rather than return to him--' "

I interrupted the narrative at that point.

"What other person could she have had to think of?" I said.

"Is it possible, George," my mother rejoined, "that you have no suspicion of what she was alluding to when she said those words?"

The question passed by me unheeded: my thoughts were dwelling bitterly on Van Brandt and his advertisement. "She answered the advertisement, of course?" I said.

"And she saw Mr. Van Brandt," my mother went on. "She gave me no detailed account of the interview between them. 'He reminded me,' she said, 'of what I knew to be true--that the woman who had entrapped him into marrying her was an incurable drunkard, and that his ever living with her again was out of the question. Still she was alive, and she had a right to the name at least of his wife. I won't attempt to excuse my returning to him, knowing the circumstances as I did. I will only say that I could see no other choice before me, in my position at the time. It is needless to trouble you with what I have suffered since, or to speak of what I may suffer still. I am a lost woman. Be under no alarm, madam, about your son. I shall remember proudly to the end of my life that he once offered me the honor and the happiness of becoming his wife; but I know what is due to him and to you. I have seen him for the last time. The one thing that remains to be done is to satisfy him that our marriage is impossible. You are a mother; you will understand why I reveal the obstacle which stands between us--not to him, but to you.' She rose saying those words, and opened the folding-doors which led from the parlor into a back room. After an absence of a few moments only, she returned."

At that crowning point in the narrative, my mother stopped. Was she afraid to go on? or did she think it needless to say more?

"Well?" I said.

"Must I really tell it to you in words, George? Can't you guess how it ended, even yet?"

There were two difficulties in the way of my understanding her. I had a man's bluntness of perception, and I was half maddened by suspense. Incredible as it may appear, I was too dull to guess the truth even now.

"When she returned to me," my mother resumed, "she was not alone. She had