“Mr. Jarndyce—­” I was beginning when my mother hurriedly inquired, “Does he suspect?”

“No,” said I.  “No, indeed!  Be assured that he does not!” And I told her what he had related to me as his knowledge of my story.  “But he is so good and sensible,” said I, “that perhaps if he knew—­”

My mother, who until this time had made no change in her position, raised her hand up to my lips and stopped me.

“Confide fully in him,” she said after a little while.  “You have my free consent—­a small gift from such a mother to her injured child!—­but do not tell me of it.  Some pride is left in me even yet.”

I explained, as nearly as I could then, or can recall now—­for my agitation and distress throughout were so great that I scarcely understood myself, though every word that was uttered in the mother’s voice, so unfamiliar and so melancholy to me, which in my childhood I had never learned to love and recognize, had never been sung to sleep with, had never heard a blessing from, had never had a hope inspired by, made an enduring impression on my memory—­I say I explained, or tried to do it, how I had only hoped that Mr. Jarndyce, who had been the best of fathers to me, might be able to afford some counsel and support to her.  But my mother answered no, it was impossible; no one could help her.  Through the desert that lay before her, she must go alone.

“My child, my child!” she said.  “For the last time!  These kisses for the last time!  These arms upon my neck for the last time!  We shall meet no more.  To hope to do what I seek to do, I must be what I have been so long.  Such is my reward and doom.  If you hear of Lady Dedlock, brilliant, prosperous, and flattered, think of your wretched mother, conscience-stricken, underneath that mask!  Think that the reality is in her suffering, in her useless remorse, in her murdering within her breast the only love and truth of which it is capable!  And then forgive her if you can, and cry to heaven to forgive her, which it never can!”

We held one another for a little space yet, but she was so firm that she took my hands away, and put them back against my breast, and with a last kiss as she held them there, released them, and went from me into the wood.  I was alone, and calm and quiet below me in the sun and shade lay the old house, with its terraces and turrets, on which there had seemed to me to be such complete repose when I first saw it, but which now looked like the obdurate and unpitying watcher of my mother’s misery.

Stunned as I was, as weak and helpless at first as I had ever been in my sick chamber, the necessity of guarding against the danger of discovery, or even of the remotest suspicion, did me service.  I took such precautions as I could to hide from Charley that I had been crying, and I constrained myself to think of every sacred obligation that there was upon me to be careful and collected.  It was not a