"I wrote it at M. Linders' dictation, Madame."
"Ah, exactly—in this letter then, I see that my brother wishes me to take charge of his child. I confess that, after all that has passed between us, I am at a loss to imagine on what grounds he can found such a request."
"But—pardon me, Madame—" said Graham, "as your brother's only surviving relative—so at least I understood him to say—you surely become the natural guardian of his child."
"My brother and I renounced each other, and parted years ago,
Monsieur; were you at all intimate with him?"
"Not in the least," replied Graham; "I knew nothing, or next to nothing, of him, till I attended him in his last illness; it was by the merest accident that I became, in any way, mixed up in his affairs."
"Then you are probably unaware of the character he bore," Thérèse Linders said, suddenly exchanging her air of cold constraint for a voice and manner expressive of the bitterest scorn; "he was a gambler by profession, a man of the most reckless and dissipated life; he plunged by choice into the lowest society he could find; he broke his mother's heart before he was one-and-twenty; he neglected, and all but deserted his wife; he ruined the lives of all who came in his way—he was a man without principle or feeling, without affection for any living being."
"Pardon me, Madame," Graham said again, "he was devotedly attached to his little daughter, and—and he is dead; to the dead much may surely be forgiven," for indeed at that moment his sympathies were rather with the man by whose death-bed he had watched than with the bitter woman before him.
"There is no question of forgiveness here," says Madame the Superior, with a slight change of manner; "I bear my brother no malice; it was not I that he injured, though he would doubtless have done so had it been in his power. In separating myself from him, I felt that I was only doing my duty; but I have kept myself informed as to his career, and had I seen many change or hope of amendment, I might have made some steps towards reconciliation."
"And that step, Madame," Graham ventured to say, "was taken by your brother on his death-bed——"
"Are you alluding to this letter, Monsieur?" she inquired, crushing it in her hand as she spoke, "you have forgotten its contents strangely, if you imagine that I consider that as a step towards reconciliation. My brother expresses no wish of the kind; he was no hypocrite at least, and he says with sufficient plainness, that he only turns to me as a last resource."