“'Old man,' I said, in a hollow, sepulchral voice, 'you have no daughter'—and throwing myself from my horse, I rushed into the house.
“I will not attempt to describe the scene which followed. How the old man rushed to her room, and the truth flashed upon his mind that she had fled with her guilty lover. How he threw himself upon the bed of his lost and ruined daughter, and a stranger before to tears, now wept aloud. And how he prayed with the fervor of one who prays for the salvation of a soul, that God would strike with the lightning of his wrath the destroyer of his peace, the betrayer of his daughter's virtue. Had Edward Hansford witnessed that scene, he had been punished enough even for his guilt.
“Well, he deserted the trusting girl, and she returned to her now darkened home; but, alas, how changed! When her child was born, the innocent offspring of her guilt, in the care attending its nurture, the violent grief of the mother gave way to a calm and settled melancholy. All saw that the iron had entered her soul. Her old father died, blessing and forgiving her, and with touching regard for his memory, she refused to desecrate his pure name, by permitting the child of shame to bear it. She called it after a distant relation, who never heard of the dishonour thus attached to his name. A heart so pure as was the heart of Mary Howard, could not long bear up beneath this load of shame. She lingered about five years after the birth of her boy, and on her dying bed confided the child to me. There in that sacred hour, I vowed to rear and protect the little innocent, and by God's permission I have kept that vow.”
“Oh, tell me, tell me,” said Bernard, wildly, “am I that child of guilt and shame.”
“Alas! Alfred, my son, you are,” said the preacher, “but oh, you know not all the terrible vengeance which a mysterious heaven will this day visit on the children of your father.”
As the awful truth gradually dawned upon him, Bernard cried with deep emotion.
“And Edward Hansford! tell me what became of him?”
“With the most diligent search I could hear nothing of him for years. At length I learned that he had come to Virginia, married a young lady of some fortune and family, and had at last been killed in a skirmish with the Indians, leaving an only son, an infant in arms, the only remaining comfort of his widowed mother.”
“And that son,” cried Bernard, the perspiration bursting from his brow in the agony of the moment.
“Is Thomas Hansford, who, I fear, this day meets his fate by a brother's and a rival's hand.”