Then the paper slipped from her nerveless fingers, her head dropped unconsciously upon the table before her, and she knew nothing more until, long afterward, when she awoke from her swoon to find her lamp gone out and the room growing cold, while her heart felt as if it had been paralyzed in her bosom.
CHAPTER VII.
TWO NEW ACQUAINTANCES.
Edith, when consciousness returned, had not a doubt that the letters, which she had been reading, had been penned by the hand of her own mother; that she was that little baby who had been born in Rome—that child of shame whose father had so heartlessly deserted it; whose mother, her brain turned by her suffering and wrongs, had planned to take her own life, rather than live to taint her little one's future with the shadow of her own disgrace.
The knowledge of this seemed to blight, as with a lightning flash, every hope of her life.
She groped her way to the bed, for she was becoming benumbed with the cold, and threw herself upon it, utterly wretched, utterly hopeless. For hours she lay there in a sort of stupor, conscious only of one terrible fact—her shame—her ruined life!
She had never dreamed, until within that hour, that she was not the daughter of those whom she had always known as her father and mother.
She had known that they had gone abroad immediately after their marriage, and had spent more than a year visiting foreign countries.
She had been told that she was born in Rome, in 18—, and she now realized that the letters which she had just read had been mostly written during the same year.