into other hands. Evidently it was the paramount duty of rescuing from
want or from sin the writer's forsaken child, that had overborne all
other considerations in the mind of the Woman and the Priest she
consulted.

Throughout that letter, what a strange perversion of understanding! what
a half-unconscious confusion of wrong and right!--the duty marked out so
obvious and so neglected; even the religious sentiment awakened by the
conscience so dividing itself from the moral instinct! the dread of being
thought less religious by obscure comparative strangers stronger than the
moral obligation to discover and reclaim the child for whose errors, if
she had erred, the mother who so selfishly forsook her was alone
responsible! even at the last, at the approach of death, the love for a
name she had never made a self-sacrifice to preserve unstained; and that
concluding exhortation,--that reliance on a repentance in which there was
so qualified a reparation!

More would Victor de Mauldon have wondered had he known those points of
similarity in character, and in the nature of their final bequests,
between Louise Duval and the husband she had deserted. By one of those
singular coincidences which, if this work be judged by the ordinary rules
presented to the ordinary novel-reader, a critic would not unjustly
impute to defective invention in the author, the provision for this
child, deprived of its natural parents during their lives, is left to the
discretion and honour of trustees, accompanied on the part of the
consecrated Louise and "the blameless King," with the injunction of
respect to their worldly reputations--two parents so opposite in
condition, in creed, in disposition, yet assimilating in that point of
individual character in which it touches the wide vague circle of human
opinion. For this, indeed, the excuses of Richard King are strong,