An anonymous letter always carries with it the venom of a serpent.  I have long known your history, though the world generally believed you to be the actual daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Marchmont, who adopted you when you were scarcely one week old.

No daughter ever received more affection or better care than these good people gave you.  Mrs. Marchmont lived always with a fear in her heart that you might learn your history from some idle or malicious lip, and before she died begged me to be your comforting friend, if that hour ever came, which has now arrived.

As your mother’s nearest friend, it is natural you should turn to me in your crucial hour of pain.  And in reply to your questions regarding the truth of this anonymous assertion, I will tell you all I know.

Your own mother was well born, and a girl of great beauty and charm.  She was of foreign blood, and her parents, after the foreign custom, selected for her, at the age of seventeen, a man of mature years and unattractive personality, but some fortune.  The family lived in a seaport town, and your mother attracted the eye of a young seafaring man, holding a government position.  An intense and uncontrollable love sprang up between them.  Your mother had been kept in ignorance of God’s great law of sex attraction, its purpose and its results, and she was like a new-born babe towed on the sea of her own suddenly awakened emotion.

It was arranged that your mother was to elope with her lover on his next arrival in port.  All plans were to be made by him during the voyage on which he went forth, after a stolen interview with your mother.  He was lost at sea, and all on board the ship perished with him.  Mr. and Mrs. Marchmont chanced to be sojourning in the place at the time of your birth.  Mr. Marchmont had longed for a child, and the tragic story came to his ears through the physician of your mother’s family, and he and his wife decided to adopt you and take you to America.

I was the one friend who shared with Mrs. Marchmont the story of your birth.  Other friends knew she had adopted a child, and of course all sorts of rumours were afloat for a time.  Mr. Marchmont’s nephew was particularly unfriendly, I remember, as he had believed himself heir to his uncle’s estate until your adoption.

Some three years ago I chanced to be in the seaport town where you were born, and I made quiet inquiries about your mother.  I learned that she had recently died, leaving a husband and three children.  I hunted up the children, and found them to be most uninteresting and ordinary.  The oldest daughter I met and studied.  She was plain and commonplace in appearance, and the other children were dull and unattractive.

The husband was the elderly man selected by your grandparents.  Just how he had been led to accept the second place in your mother’s life, and whether he had known of the tragedy, I could not learn without asking more questions than I deemed wise.