mother came home to live with them. They had been married four or
five years, but none of their children had lived.

So it was when the discovery came upon poor old Mrs. Dayman (I do not
know what else to call her), that Fulk Torwood Trevor, the husband of
her youth, was not dead, but was Earl of Trevorsham; married, and the
father of four children in England.

Poor old thing! She would have buried her secret to the last, as
much in pity and love to him as in shame and grief for herself; and
consideration, too, for the sons, for whom the discovery was only
less bad than for us, as they had less to lose. Hester herself
hardly fully understood what it all involved, and it only gradually
grew on her.

That winter her mother fell ill, and Mr. Lea felt it right that the
small property she had had for her life should be properly secured to
her sons, according to the division their father had intended. So a
lawyer was brought from Montreal and her will was made. Thus another
person knew about it, and he was much struck, and explained to Hester
that she was really a lady of rank, and probably the only child of
her father who had any legal claim to his estates. Lea, with a good
deal of the old American Republican temper, would not be stirred up.
He despised lords and ladies, and would none of it; but the lawyer
held that it would be doing wrong not to preserve the record. Hester
had grown excited, and seconded him; and one day, when Lea was out,
the lawyer brought a magistrate to take Mrs. Dayman's affidavit as to
all her past history--marriage witnesses and all. She was a good
deal overcome and agitated, and quite implored Hester never to use
the knowledge against her father; but she must have been always a