"The secret of this," said he, "is in a youthful and most fervent
attachment; your mother loved a young stranger above her in rank, who
(his head being full of German romance) was then roaming about the
country on pedestrian and adventurous excursions, under the assumed name
of Butler. By him she was most ardently beloved in return. Her father,
perhaps, suspected the rank of her lover, and was fearful of her honour
being compromised. He was a strange man, that father! and I know not his
real character and motives; but he suddenly withdrew his daughter from
the suit and search of her lover,--they saw each other no more; her lover
mourned her as one dead. In process of time your mother was constrained
by her father to marry Mr. Cameron, and was left a widow with an only
child,--yourself: she was poor;--very poor! and her love and anxiety for
you at last induced her to listen to the addresses of my late uncle; for
your sake she married again; again death dissolved the tie! But still,
unceasingly and faithfully, she recalled that first love, the memory of
which darkened and embittered all her life, and still she lived upon the
hope to meet with the lost again. At last, and most recently, it was my
fate to discover that the object of this unconquerable affection
lived,--was still free in hand if not in heart: you behold the lover of
your mother in Ernest Maltravers! It devolved on me (an invidious--a
reluctant duty) to inform Maltravers of the identity of Lady Vargrave
with the Alice of his boyish passion; to prove to him her suffering,
patient, unsubdued affection; to convince him that the sole hope left to
her in life was that of one day or other beholding him once again. You
know Maltravers,--his high-wrought, sensitive, noble character; he
recoiled in terror from the thought of making his love to the daughter
the last and bitterest affliction to the mother he had so loved; knowing
too how completely that mother had entwined herself round your
affections, he shuddered at the pain and self-reproach that would be
yours when you should discover to whom you had been the rival, and whose