"I did not know then that this companion of his was my husband. I found that out afterwards, and that he was more than robbed.
"Soon after that event, De Vrai brought the widow of his victim to live in our house. I was the wife—she the mistress. I was blind at first, but I soon had my eyes opened. Opened not only to that fact, but that that wife had stood behind her husband's chair while he played with the villain who robbed him, and gave the signal of what cards he held; and afterwards, when he became sober enough to realize his ruin, she proposed that they should take poison, and die together.
"The result need not be told, only that he died and she lived.
"When I made these discoveries from an overheard conversation, I ordered the vile woman from my house.
"'My house, my house, ha, ha, you poor simpleton. Every article in this house and every cent of money that you or your husband has on earth belongs to me, and these are the papers.
"'Now if you behave yourself you can stay here, if not, you will have to tramp, both of you.'
"She shook the papers in my face, and laughed at my look of fear and astonishment. To finish my agony, when I began to talk something about the rights of an English wife, she coolly told me that she had just as good a right to my husband as I had, for he had one wife when I married him, and that rendered my marriage a nullity. What a shock for a wife—to hear that she is no wife, or if she is, the wife of a robber, adulterer, and murderer.
"I heard all this with a sort of indifference foreign to my very nature. It was well that I did, for it enabled me to perfect my plans, and carry them out with a degree of coolness worthy of a better purpose. I had been promising for some time to visit a friend for a week, and I set about packing up for the journey at once. I said not one word to De Vrai of what I heard, nor gave him one look of reproof. Fortune had made me acquainted with the secret hiding-place of the money this guilty pair had obtained from their poor victim, and I did not feel any compunctions of conscience in taking it from them. In three days afterwards I was in Paris. Here I lived a few months a wretched life of dissipation, and then De Vrai, tracked me to my hiding-place and I had to fly once more; this time across the ocean.
"I had five hundred dollars when I arrived in this city. What might I not have done with that sum, if I had used it prudently? What I did do, I must tell, that it may be a warning to others. It would be a source of consolation to me if I knew that the follies of my life could be illuminated and set up as a beacon light to my fellow creatures, to save them from the quicksands of dissipation upon which I have been wrecked—wrecked by my own folly and foolish pride.
"It was pride, foolish wicked pride, that led me to go to a fashionable hotel, and put up, with my two children and nurse, as Madame De Vrai, from Paris. How soon five hundred dollars melt away, even with prudent living, at a New York hotel. I did not live prudently. I drank to excess, gave late suppers, and gambled. This could not last long, though many hundreds of the dollars worse than wasted in those few weeks, were won from others equally guilty of this besetting wickedness and folly with myself. Such a life could not last. My first step down was to a cheap lodging in Crosby street. I cannot tell how I lived there. I only know that my valuables, my clothes, everything went to the pawnbroker, and I went to that wretched hole where you first saw me in Cow Bay, from whence I drove my poor little Katy out in the streets at midnight, to sell Hot Corn. It was there that my poor child died. It was there that you received her dying blessing, and I her dying forgiveness for all the wrongs that I had heaped upon her poor innocent head. It was then by her death that I was awakened to consciousness and I felt and saw my own deep soul and body destroying degradation. It was through her death and translation to a home in heaven, that I have obtained a hope that my Father may forgive what my child has forgiven, and that, I may yet see her again. It was Him, it must have been Him that opened your ear to that little plaintive cry of 'Hot Corn,' that rose up through your window on its way to the home of angels watching over a child whom her mother had forsaken.