“Belmont was deeply moved, but his purpose did not falter.
“ ‘You are dead to them, Catherine,’ he replied, with assumed coldness, ‘and must remain so.’
“Even on her knees the wretched woman prayed to see her children; but she prayed in vain. Hard as it was for Belmont to resist her agonized entreaties, he remained firm to his well-formed purpose.
“The moment of parting with her, and leaving her in loneliness and misery on the very spot where she had once been so happy, and with a thousand things around her to remind her of that happiness, was a most painful one. It was with difficulty that Belmont could restrain the desire he felt to take her in his arms, press her to his bosom, and forgive and forget all. But her sin had been too deep—she had fallen too low. He could not throw over the past the blessed mantle of forgiveness; and so he left her alone, to shiver by the cold ashes of a darkened hearth.”
“Has her husband never returned?” I asked.
“Never! Five years have passed since he left, but no one has seen him in this region. There came a rumor a few years ago, that he had met Edgerton, and made him account with his life for his crime. But I know not whether this be so.”
A year afterward I received a letter from my excellent friend, the doctor, in which he mentioned that death had given the unhappy Mrs. Belmont a kind release; “and, we may hope,” he remarked, “that through much suffering she was purified and forgiven.”
THE WAYSIDE DREAM.
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