too well. My only hope was the impression your dear face would make
upon her. I was sure that for her to see you would be to love you.
But I was mistaken."

"Alas! too sadly mistaken. We have made her unhappy through life.
Oh! how that thought distresses me."

"She deserves all the unhappiness she may feel. For me, I do not
pity her." Charles Linden said this with a good deal of bitterness.

"Oh! Charles--do not speak so--do not feel so. She is your mother,
and you acted against what you knew to be one of her strongest
prejudices," Ellen said earnestly. "I do not feel angry with her.
When I think of her, it is with grief, that she is unhappy. The time
may yet come--pray heaven it come quickly!--when she will feel
differently toward one whose heart she does not know--when she will
love me as a mother."

"She does not deserve the love of one like you," was the bitterly
spoken reply.

"Ah, Charles! why will you speak so? It is not right."

"I can no more help it than I can help feeling and thinking, Ellen.
I am indignant, and I must express my feelings. What a poor
substitute is birth, or family connexion, or standing in society for
a mother to offer to her son, in the place of a pure heart that can
love fervently. If I had yielded to dictation on this subject, I
would long ago have been the unhappy husband of a vain, selfish,
proud creature, whom I never could have loved. No--no--Ellen. I