"And now you will tell her all—everything," I said, squeezing her hands, while the tears were raining down my face.
"Margery, Margery!" cried Rachel, "how can I give up Arthur? Here he has come to me after these years of waiting, and presses me to name a day for our marriage, and I am to meet him with a story like this! He would despise me."
"I think," said I, "that if he be a generous man he will forgive you. After loving you so long, he will not give you up so easily. And your mother," I added. "Think of all she has suffered. Is she worth no sacrifice?"
"She never knew me," said Rachel gloomily, "and she will be happier never to know me. She could not have smiled as she did to-day if she had not forgotten that I ever existed."
"That is a selfish delusion," I said. "If your mother never knew you, it is plain, at least, that you have never known her. Such a woman could not forget her child. You cannot think that she has not sought for you, and mourned for you, all these years?"
"Oh no," said Rachel, with another burst of sorrow, "John has told me. They searched, they advertised, they suffered agony, and feared every terrible thing, till at last they were obliged to soothe one another by trying to think me, by speaking of me as, dead. Little Mopsie thinks I am dead. So it has been, and so it must be."
"So it must not be," I persisted, and I fought with her all night. The dawn was in the room before she got up to leave me, pale, and worn, and weary, but promising that she would make yet one more great struggle with herself to break the chain of deceit with which one rash falsehood had so strongly bound her.