"Oh, Daisy!" she cried, clasping her hands and looking up too, "is it possible that you neither know nor guess that I was to have been your father's wife, and that you ought to have been my child?"
Her passionate tone went through my very heart.
"You, Kate!" I said; "you!"
"Yes," she replied, weeping more slowly; "it was to have been—it was not—he died here alone, I was far away."
Miss O'Reilly made me feel very strangely. I had never known my mother. I drew closer to her, and after a while I said—
"Why did you not marry him?"
"He was poor, and I had the child to rear; I could not bear to bring two burdens upon him; it was pride, he thought it was mistrust, and married another; I had no right to complain, nor did I; but it was then I took to being so fond of the boy, just I suppose because he had cost me so dear."
"But why did you not marry Papa after Mamma died?" I inquired.
"He never asked me, child," and she bowed her head with sad and humble resignation; "I thought he would, and I should have been glad to have had him, but perhaps he could not quite forgive my having once preferred my little brother to my grown-up lover; perhaps he thought me altered, and no longer the pretty girl he had courted: whatever it was, he did not ask me; and yet how good and friendly it was of him to help me as he did to rear the boy for whom I had given him up! I sometimes think he liked me in his heart, for Cornelius has often told me how my name was the last he uttered; and I cannot help fancying he meant I was to have the care of you. Oh! Midge, Midge," she added, looking me in the face very wistfully, "I have loved you very dearly, because you were his child, but I have often remembered that you ought also to have been mine."
"If you had been Papa's wife, I mean his first wife," I said very earnestly, "I should have been the niece of Cornelius, should I not, Kate?"