Sinclair's face showed how deeply he was moved; but the one fact he seemed able to realise then was that Fredericka was starving! He scarcely noticed when the girl passed on and left him alone the girl who was her daughter.

The next day, Sinclair set out prosaically in a cab to find the address which had been given to him; but he felt like a man who was dreaming as, after some trouble, he made his way up to the third floor of a shabby, ill-smelling house. He had been directed to the front room, but no words can describe his mingled feelings of longing and shrinking as he knocked at the door.

A weak voice said, "Come in:" and he entered. He found himself in a small, poorly-furnished room, and, in spite of the voice that had answered his knock, Sinclair thought at first sight that it was empty; then, on the bed, and covered with what had been once a handsome shawl, he saw a woman lying.

During the years which had passed since he had last seen Mrs. Douglas, he had often told himself that he should always know her, no matter what havoc time had made in her beauty, but he was wrong; he did not at first recognise the woman he had so faithfully loved in the worn, faded creature stretched upon the poor bed before him.

But Fredericka knew him at once; and while he stood just within the door, uncertain what to say or do, she remained still and silent, watching him; then, presently, as he moved forward a step or two, she raised herself upon her elbow, their eyes met, and he knew her.

"At last!" was all she said, when Sinclair, quite unable to speak, went up to the bed-side and held out his hand. "At last!" she repeated, as she put her thin cold fingers into his; "and if I ever prayed one earnest prayer in the course of my miserable, wicked life, it was that we might never meet again. You ought to curse the day I crossed your path a second time."

"I have never cursed it!" he answered quietly enough, and then he was so utterly miserable, and so anxious to be simply and naturally helpful to her in her great need, that he faltered out some conventional platitude which he knew well enough was like offering a stone for bread.

"Ah!" she said plaintively when he had done, "it is of no use to talk to me like that now."

My poor Fredericka!" was the reply so tenderly uttered, that all constraint vanished in a moment, and the man who

had loved, and the woman who had suffered, looked long and mournfully into one another's eyes.

"Your Fredericka!" she said at last.

"Ah, not yours; I fear

I am not given to thank God very often, but I do thank Him that I was never yours; you were far too honourable, too good, to have had your name dragged through the mire by bestowing it upon me; I believe, to desert you as I did eleven years ago, was the one good act of my life."

Sinclair was silent; he would not pain the poor broken-down creature before him by reminding her that it would have been a still better action on her part if she had not deceived him as to her real position from the first. She seemed to read his thoughts, for she continued

"You think it would have been kinder still if I had not promised to be your wife; but I had heard that he was dead—had been killed tiger-hunting in India. It was only a rumour which I never tried to verify, and I hoped with all my heart that it was true. I knew I was not a good woman; the fact that I concealed the truth from you is proof enough of that; but I thought that as your wife I might become better, and, indeed— indeed, I loved you."

How those words from her lips would have moved him in the past; but he was calm enough, outwardly, as he stood there listening then.

“There is still much that I cannot understand,” he said, and his voice seemed stern to Fredericka; "but do not explain anything if it pains you to speak of the past. You said just now that you did not know your husband was still alive when you promised to be my wife; who then was the Captain Douglas with whom you were living at M- and about whose death there could be no doubt; the father of the boy

"A boy who, happily for himself, is in his grave," she interrupted. "I thought you would question me about that part of my history, and I must tell you all now, in spite of pain and shame. The night-it was our last meeting-I told you Harry was my only child; I deceived you-lied to you, in fact. I had a girl, called Helen, and very soon after her birth my husband began to neglect me, and I had but too good reason for suspecting his fidelity. Being vain, I was jealous, although I I cared very little for him, and I made his conduct the excuse for my own. I do not attempt now to use such a vindication of myself to you; but it sufficed then for my own conscience, and

the admiration I received from others more than made up for my husband's coldness and neglect. My chief friend, as I called him then, was my husband's cousin, also a Captain Douglas, and the eldest son of the head of the House. It so happened that his regiment and that of my husband were, for a time, at the same station, and, of course, the relationship brought about a close intimacy; but I can say with truth, what I believe every woman feels bound to say under the same circumstances, that I meant no harm. He was handsomer and more attractive, in many ways, than my husband, and as he exerted himself in every possible manner to make my life pass pleasantly, I soon began to compare the two men, to the disadvantage of the one to whom I was bound; and that was my first step on the road to ruin. I cannot help thinking now that my husband, being heartily tired of me, threw me into the way of temptation, in the hope that the so-called friendship between myself and his cousin would end as it did. If that was his object, he succeeded but too well; for when my little girl was just a year old I deserted her, and eloped with the man who bore the same name as my husband.

manner.

"He was in love with me then, at least in what men such as he call love, and he vowed that as soon as my husband got a divorce he would marry me; he sold out, and as he had a very good private income, we were able to live abroad in a luxurious I was happy; I had no qualms of conscience; for, having been carelessly brought up, my views of right and wrong were hazy in the extreme. We went about a great deal, travelling of course as husband and wife, and when I occasionally met people whom I knew, they always seemed a little puzzled; they knew I had married a Captain Douglas, but they had, one and all, some vague impression upon their minds that my husband was only related to, and not actually, heir, to the head of the Douglas family. As you may suppose, I offered no explanation; the fact of my elopement was happily unknown, and, I believe, I began at last to fancy that I belonged legally to the man with whom I lived; but we were not able to marry, as my husband never got a divorce. Time went on, my son was born, and I realised for the first time, what men had a right to call me, when I looked at his innocent little face, and heard his father say, 'Poor little beggar, he can never be Douglas of the Chase.' Soon after the child's birth, Captain Douglas took to gambling, and, by degrees, to hard-drinking. He began to gather a fast set about him, and my influence, such as it was, grew less

and less every day; but he was still tolerably kind when he was sober, or when he had been winning, which was not often; but when he had had a run of ill-luck, his treatment was brutal, and my life was miserable; he always made me dress splendidly, and my velvets and satins often covered shoulders black and bruised from his blows; but he liked me to look well and handsome. I attracted the pigeons' he said; pigeons, however, who were not often plucked by him.

"That awful night at M things had come to their worst; he had had his usual gambling party and had lost heavily; I believe he was mad with disappointment and drink.

When we
He got

were alone I ventured to remonstrate with him, and implored of him to think of the ruin he was bringing upon us. furious; called me by the most opprobrious names, and ended by presenting a pistol at my head. Then it was that I rushed

into your room for protection, for he swore he would kill me that I had been his ruin, body and soul. You know the rest. His family, of course, would not acknowledge the child, and there was no provision for him, for Captain Douglas, who had inherited at twenty-one a fortune from his grandmother, had squandered every shilling of it, and died heavily in debt.

"I now come to the month before my intended marriage with you. You remember the little girl from whom I bought the flowers at Covent Garden ?-the strangest conviction took possession of me that that child was my daughter Helen for I saw in her a very strong likeness to the Douglas family. On my way home from the Opera I saw her again in company with a man who was singing in the street. Acting upon an impulse, for which I cannot account, and which certainly was not love for the child, I stopped the carriage in order to look at her again and give her some money; and when the light fell upon the man who was with her I recognised my husband; he knew me at once, and he followed the carriage to find out my address. The next morning brought me a letter from him containing a demand for an interview, and the same evening I went to his house, a shabby lodging in the East-End. He had found out all about my approaching marriage, and he threatened that if I did not at once break it off he would expose me. I consented: knowing that, as he was alive, even a private marriage would have been illegal, and I could not bear to subject you, not to the chance, but to the certainty, of disgrace through me, or to the misery of hearing the story of my life from his lips; I finally resolved that you should not hear it from mine. He knew I had two

hundred a year, and, if I had agreed, he would have taken me to live with him again, but any fate would have been preferable to that, for a man who can condone his own dishonour is below contempt. At last we made a compromise; upon condition that he left me unmolested, and that he would not seek you out, I consented to take Helen to live with me, to allow her father a hundred and twenty per annum out of my small income, and to break off all intercourse with you. I agreed readily enough to give you up, miserable and degraded as I was, degraded by my own conduct, and by my tie to him, I could not have borne to see you again—you, my ideal of a chivalrous and honourable

man.

"My husband began to lead a more respectable life upon the means supplied by me (he had also, by gambling and dissipation, run through his income, and when I met him, he was singing in the streets for a livelihood), and men whom he had known formerly began to notice him; and he might have got on well enough if the old passion for card-playing and horse-racing had not seized upon him; he had but little to spend, and as ill-luck invariably followed him, I was soon obliged to provide him with funds out of my small capital. I ought, perhaps, to have resisted his claims, but his threats of exposure to you always conquered me, and exposure would also have followed an appeal to the law for protection. By degrees, my money all went; he had made an end of the last five hundred I possessed a few days before he was killed at Baker Street, and I was obliged to let him be buried by the parish. The day of the accident, he was on his way to make Helen accept an engagement to sing at one of the East-End music-halls, and after his death she sang there for awhile at a fair salary, but the life was hateful to her, and she gave it up. She is a good girl, but where she learned her goodness it is hard to say; perhaps she learned it from disgust at our bad example; her wretched father and I never met without a quarrel, and miserable exchange of hard words and cruel reproaches; and lately I forced myself to tell her the story of my life. It was not an easy thing for a mother to do, and I saw that it killed the small spark of love she had for She is very kind, and she works hard to get little comforts for me, but it is all duty; there is no love. However, she will soon be released-I am dying."

me.

"You do look very ill," said Sinclair. He was stunned by the revelation she had made; but the deep pity he felt quivered in his voice as he spoke.