such a despicable manner.

An anonymous letter always carries with it the venom of a serpent. I
have long known your history, though the world generally believed you to
be the actual daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Marchmont, who adopted you when
you were scarcely one week old.

No daughter ever received more affection or better care than these good
people gave you. Mrs. Marchmont lived always with a fear in her heart
that you might learn your history from some idle or malicious lip, and
before she died begged me to be your comforting friend, if that hour
ever came, which has now arrived.

As your mother's nearest friend, it is natural you should turn to me in
your crucial hour of pain. And in reply to your questions regarding the
truth of this anonymous assertion, I will tell you all I know.

Your own mother was well born, and a girl of great beauty and charm. She
was of foreign blood, and her parents, after the foreign custom,
selected for her, at the age of seventeen, a man of mature years and
unattractive personality, but some fortune. The family lived in a
seaport town, and your mother attracted the eye of a young seafaring
man, holding a government position. An intense and uncontrollable love
sprang up between them. Your mother had been kept in ignorance of God's
great law of sex attraction, its purpose and its results, and she was
like a new-born babe towed on the sea of her own suddenly awakened
emotion.

It was arranged that your mother was to elope with her lover on his next
arrival in port. All plans were to be made by him during the voyage on