This revelation Adam Brewster did not find until after she had been in her grave many weeks, when he finally gathered courage to examine a box which she had told him, with almost her last breath, contained something of great importance.
It came upon him with the force of a thunderbolt—he was almost paralyzed with grief and dismay when he read his wife’s letter, and found the proof of its contents in the articles of infant’s clothing which she had preserved—in the note which she had pinned upon the dress of the abandoned child, and the golden key, which was her only heritage.
It was a terrible blow! His darling—his idol, in whom all his fondest hopes were centered—not his own child! It could not be possible, for no father could so worship the offspring of another.
The struggle between love, grief, disappointment, and indignation was long and bitter; but love finally triumphed over all.
“No one need ever know it,” he told himself, but with a twinge of keenest pain in view of his own knowledge. “She is mine—I claim her as my very own by the love I bear her; no one shall ever suspect the truth—she shall never learn it, and thus I shall never be in danger of losing her. I will destroy every evidence of the fact, and then the secret will be buried in my own heart. And, ah, me! forgive my dear lost wife for her deception I must, in view of that other secret which I have withheld from her.”
The man fully intended to destroy all evidence that Allison Porter was not his own child, but, thinking that he might wish to examine the contents of the box more carefully in a few days—after he had recovered somewhat from the shock he had received—he put it away, with some jewels belonging to his wife, in a secret compartment in the vault in his bank, where, amid the press of business and of many cares, it was forgotten; or, if not forgotten, neglected for many years.