“I gave a scream when I saw him, but he begged me not to be frightened of him; and then I asked him if he had forgiven me. He said he had tried to forgive me. He was very grave and quiet; but though I think he tried to be gentle, there was a sort of suppressed sternness in his manner which made me feel afraid of him. He had not very long returned from the East, he said, and he was very lonely and wretched. He had heard from my father that I was going to India, and that I had a little girl, whom I was obliged to take abroad with me for want of the means of providing her with a comfortable home in England. He proposed to me to adopt this little girl, and to bring her up as his own daughter, with my husband’s consent.
“He promised to leave her very well off at his death, and to give her a fortune if he lived to see her married. He would be most likely, he said, to leave her all his money; but he made it a condition that neither I nor her father should have any further claim upon her. We were to give her up altogether, and were to be satisfied with hearing of her from time to time, through him.
“‘I am a lonely man, Mrs. Lennard,’ he said; ‘even my wealth is a burden to me. My life is purposeless and empty. I have no incentive to labour—nothing to love or to protect. Let me have your little girl; I shall be a better father to her than your husband can be.’
“At first I thought that I could never, never consent to such a thing; but little by little he won me over, in a grave, persuasive way, that convinced me in spite of myself, and I couldn’t afford to engage a nurse to go out to Calcutta with me, and I’d advertised for an ayah who wanted to return, and who would go with me for the consideration of her passage-money, but there had been no answers to my advertisements: so at last I consented to write to Fred to ask him if he would agree to our parting with the pet. Fred wrote me the shortest of letters by return of post; ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘the child would be an awful nuisance on shipboard, and it will be much better for her to stop in England.’ I sent his letter to the lawyer, and the next day he brought a nurse, a respectable elderly person, and fetched away my precious darling.
“You see, Miss Villars, neither Fred nor I had realized the idea that we were parting with her for ever; we only thought of the convenience of getting her a happy home in England for nothing, while we went to be broiled to death’s door out in India. But! ah! when years and years passed by, and the two babies who were born in India died, I began to grieve dreadfully about my lost pet; and if I hadn’t been what some people call frivolous, and if Fred and I hadn’t suited each other so exactly, and been somehow or other always happy together in all our troubles, I think I should have broken my heart. But I tried to be resigned,” concluded Mrs. Lennard, with a profound sigh, “and I hear of my pet once in six months or so, though I never hear from her, and indeed I doubt if she knows she’s got such a thing as a mamma in the universe—and I have her portrait, poor darling, and she’s very like what I was twenty years ago.”
“I know she is,” Eleanor answered, gravely.
“You know she is! You know her, then?”
“Yes, dear Mrs. Lennard. Very strange things happen in this world, and not the least strange is the circumstance which has brought you and me together. I know your daughter intimately. Her name is Laura, is it not?”
“Yes, Laura Mason Lennard, after Fred’s rich aunt, Laura Mason.”
“And your maiden name was Margaret Ravenshaw.”