"Hear me!" she continued firmly. "With his name and my own mistress, and the girl, as I believed, properly provided for and ignorant of my existence, I saw no necessity for reopening the past. I resolved to lead a new life as his widow. I came north. In the little New England town where I first stopped, the country people contracted my name to Mrs. Argalls. I let it stand so. I came to New York and entered the service of the Lord and the bonds of the Church, Henry Pendleton, as Mrs. Argalls, and have remained so ever since."
"But you would not object to Yerba knowing that you lived, and rightly bore her father's name?" said Pendleton eagerly.
The woman looked at him with compressed lips. "I should. I have buried all my past, and all its consequences. Let me not seek to reopen it or recall them."
"But if you knew that she was as proud as yourself, and that this very uncertainty as to her name and parentage, although she has never known the whole truth, kept her from taking the name and becoming the wife of a man whom she loves?"
"Whom she loves!"
"Yes; one of her guardians—-Hathaway—to whom you intrusted her when she was a child."
"Paul Hathaway—but HE knew it."
"Yes. But SHE does not know he does. He has kept the secret faithfully, even when she refused him."
She was silent for a moment, and then said,—
"So be it. I consent."