“Papa, do not—oh! do not send me away alone—alone into the cold, cruel world. I am your only child. I have no one but you. I love you, papa. Oh, have mercy! Let me stay here in my home. I will be very quiet and humble. I will never trouble you, only let me be where I can see and hear you sometimes,” Marion cried, in her despair, as she cast herself upon her knees before the stern man.
He turned away from her with a face of stone, yet with a heart bursting with disappointment and agony equal to her own.
“Go, I say. You shall not suffer; you shall have three hundred pounds a year, and more if that is not enough; but never let me see you again. I could not bear it and live,” was all he said in reply to her agonized entreaties.
Marion tottered from the room, praying that the earth would open and swallow her and her misery, and bury her in oblivion.
That day she left Wycliffe forever.
She fled to a small town in the southwest of England, assumed a name, and lived there in quiet seclusion until her son was seventeen years of age.
Her heart was broken, her life was ruined, but she never told her boy the story of her shame and the disgrace she had entailed upon him until she lay upon her dying bed.
He had got the idea, and always believed, that his father had died before he was born, and seeing that it pained his mother to talk of the past, he never mentioned it.
Marion determined, since she had been the means of robbing him of his proud title and position, that she would devote her life to him, and rear him with a character stamped with grandeur with which no worldly title could ever endow him.
She taught him to hate everything mean or low—to love and cling to the truth, no matter what opposed—to be a manly man, never despising or exalting any one on account of position alone; but to admire and emulate true worth wherever he might find it, and regard every one whom he could respect as an equal.