"Thus far, my daughter, I have shown you all your mother's wretched past, and now I shrink from the last blotted pages. Hitherto my record was blameless, but even now take care how you judge the mother, who if she has gone astray did it for you, all for you. For some time I had known that Cuthbert was living in reckless extravagance, that the affairs of the father-in-law were dangerously involved, and that without his own father's knowledge Cuthbert had borrowed large sums in London and Paris, securing the loans by mortgages on his real estate in America; especially the elegant homestead, preserved for several generations in his family. Employing two shrewd Hebrew brokers, I by degrees bought up those mortgages, straining every effort to effect the purchase.
"When I reached Milan, I sat one night pondering what was most expedient. It was apparent that in a suit for and publication of my real title and rights, I should be defeated by the disgrace hurled upon me; and to subject the Laurances to the humiliation of a court scandal would poorly indemnify me for the horrible stain which Peterson's foul claim would entail upon your innocent but premature birth. My health was feeble, consumption threatened my lungs, and Mr. Palma urged me to attempt no legal redress for my injuries. I could not die without one more struggle to see you lighted, clothed with your lawful name.
"My daughter, my darling, let all my love for you plead vehemently in my defence, when I tell you that for your dear sake I made a desperate, an awful, a sickening resolve. General Laurance was infatuated by my beauty, which has been as fatal to his house as his name to me. Like many handsome old men, he was inordinately vain, and imagined himself irresistible; and when he persecuted me with attentions that might have compromised a woman less prudent and prudish than I bore myself, I determined to force him to an offer of his hand, to marry him."
With a sharp cry Regina sprang up.
"Mother, not him! Not my father's father!"
"Yes, René Laurance, my husband's father."
With a gesture of horror the girl groaned and covered her white convulsed face.
"Mother! Could my mother commit such a loathsome, awful crime against
God, and nature?"
"It was for your sake, my darling!" cried Mrs. Orme, wringing her hands, as she saw the shudder with which her child repulsed her.
"For my sake that you stained you dear pure hands! For my sake that you steeped your soul in guilt that even brutal savages abhor, and loaded your name and memory with infamy! In his desertion my father sinned against me, and freely because he is my father I could forgive him; but you, the immaculate mother of my lifelong worship, you who have reigned white-souled and angelic over all my hopes, my aspirations, my love and reverence, oh, mother! mother, you have doubly wronged me! The disgrace of your unnatural and heinous crime I can never, never pardon!"