"Then, if you love me so, it will be neither shock nor pain for you to know that you are my own child."
"Mrs. Pryor! That is--that means--you have adopted me?"
"It means that I am your true mother."
"But Mrs. James Helstone--but my father's wife, whom I do not remember to have seen, she is my mother?"
"She is your mother," Mrs. Pryor assured her. "James Helstone was my husband."
"Is what I hear true? Is it no dream? My own mother! And one I can be so fond of! If you are my mother, the world is all changed to me."
The offspring nestled to the parent, who gathered her to her bosom, covered her with noiseless kisses, and murmured love over her like a cushat fostering its young.
IV.--An Old Acquaintance
An uncle of Shirley Keeldar, Sympson by name, now came with his family to stay at Feidhead, and accompanying them, as tutor to a crippled son Harry, was Louis Moore, Robert's younger brother.
"Shirley," said Caroline one day as they sat in the summer-house, "you are a singular being. I thought I knew you quite well; I begin to find myself mistaken. Did you know that my cousin Louis was tutor in your uncle's family before the Sympsons came down here?"