him to induce me to consent to a private marriage. It is sufficient to say that he so worked upon my fears, by pointing out the disgrace that would befall me, when the fact of his pursuit of me should transpire, that I at last agreed to his proposal. A ceremony, which I believed to be a legal one, was gone through the next morning. Considine had assured me on several occasions that he professed no particular creed of religion; and he had more than once been seen to enter the Protestant church at P. I saw, therefore, no reason to doubt that the service, as performed by a young English clergyman who had accompanied him from P—, was a binding one, and that in the English Consul's house we were lawfully and duly married.

'The only witnesses on the occasion were Pauline, the French servant, and the English Consul; but the clergyman, who seemed to feel an interest in my fate, put into my hands ere he left, a few hastily written lines, which he told me I might eventually

find useful. Poor young man! he was one of the many who leave their friends and homes, to die alone in a warmer but less friendly soil, for a cough hard and frequent shook his thin frame, as he pronounced the blessing on those whom he had united.

'It was the last time that that feeble sufferer was called upon to perform any of the duties of his sacred profession, for ere another month was over, he lay at rest in the Protestant burial-ground of P—.

'I soon found that I had gained nothing by my ill-omened marriage; for not only was my return to my home not prevented, but I had to bear about me the burden of a heavy secret. My husband accompanied me as far as Paris, and there exacted from me an oath, the most awful and solemn, that never during the lifetime of his mother's brother and sister (persons whom he described as plunged in the lowest depths of bigotry) would I divulge the fact that he had married

an English woman, and a Protestant. I had no choice but to obey, for I was utterly at his mercy; and so the irrevocable words were spoken, and we parted Alice! I never saw him again. But I will not now dwell upon his end, and will continue my own miserable story.

'It was not long after my return home ere I found that a portion, at least, of my secret, could not be for ever hidden from those

about me. At first I rejoiced in my discovery, for I did not believe but that my husband would at once come to my relief when he knew of my situation. So I wrote to him a letter, full of hope and of entreaty, that he would lose no time in making our marriage public. I even feigned a love I did not feel, and prayed for his presence as for a thing necessary to my happiness. The answer I received was a blow to all my highly wrought expectations. It was written with chilling reserve, and betrayed far more concern for his own worldly prospects, than

of consideration either for my comfort or my character. He was greatly dependent upon his uncle and aunt (he wrote), and could not afford to throw away their regard, or his hopes of a future inheritance. "I must keep quiet," he added, "and conceal my situation as long as possible. In the end," were his concluding words, "we can together devise some means of keeping everything private." And this was the man who had sworn with such vehemence, and so many scores of times, that I was all in all to him!-that life would be worthless without me, and death with me a heaven upon earth!

'I will not pain you by describing in detail the mental and bodily sufferings I endured, while dragging through the many long and weary weeks which passed ere my mother taxed me with my fault. I do not marvel now that she deemed that fault to be so far greater than the reality; nor that (as I did not dare to confide to her the whole) she believed in none of my assertions. She had

never shown me much of the affection that is supposed of necessity to exist between mother and child, and from the hour of her fell discovery I verily believe she hated me. I went away alone, Alice. Well do I remember the awful night when, with no friend to help or cheer me, I lay in my narrow berth tossed on a wild winter-sea, that broke over the deck of a small French steamer. It was a long voyage that, from Southampton to St. Malo, but such was the route chosen for purposes of secresy and concealment. In a

foreign country, and in the heart of a great city, my child first saw the light; and I, its miserable mother, surrendered it at once into the hands of strangers. Years-long years have past since then, but visions of that season of agony haunt my memory still, and whirl me back into the past as into a heavy sea of troubles.

'Alice! the man to whom my child was given was the person Philip saw that day. It was he whose letters Philip found;