"Oh, yes—yes; I have longed for you, with longing unspeakable, ever since I knew," Edith murmured, tremulously.
"Longed for me? Ah, I never dared to hope that Heaven could be so kind. I feared, love, that you would despise me, as a weak and willful woman, even after I should tell you all my story, with its extenuating circumstances; but now, while knowing and believing only the worst, you take me into the arms of your love, and own me—your mother!"
She broke down utterly at this point, and both, clasped in each other's embrace, sobbed in silent sympathy for a few moments.
"Well, dearest, this will never do," Mrs. Stewart at last exclaimed, as she lifted her face and smiled tenderly upon Edith; "we must at least compose ourselves long enough to make our adieus to our hostess; then I am going to take you home with me, to have all the story of our tangled past unraveled and explained. Come, let us sit down for a few moments, until we get rid of the traces of our tears, and you shall tell me how you happened to be in Boston under the name of Edith Allen."
She drew her toward a couch as she spoke, and there Edith related how she had happened to meet the Goddard's on the train, between New York and Boston, and was engaged to act as madam's companion, and how also the mistake regarding her name had occurred.
"And were you happy with them, my dear?" inquired Mrs. Stewart, regarding her curiously.
The fair girl flushed.
"Indeed I was not," she replied, "I think they were the strangest people I ever met."
Almost as she spoke the door of the reception-room opened, and Gerald Goddard himself appeared upon the threshold.
He was pale to ghastliness, and looked years older than when Edith had seen him in the drawing-room a few minutes previous.