“You, who only knew Mrs. Vanstone in later life, when illness and sorrow and secret care had altered and saddened her, can form no adequate idea of her attractions of person and character when she was a girl of seventeen.  I was with Andrew when he first met her.  I had tried to rescue him, for one night at least, from degrading associates and degrading pleasures, by persuading him to go with me to a ball given by one of the great City Companies.  There they met.  She produced a strong impression on him the moment he saw her.  To me, as to him, she was a total stranger.  An introduction to her, obtained in the customary manner, informed him that she was the daughter of one Mr. Blake.  The rest he discovered from herself.  They were partners in the dance (unobserved in that crowded ball-room) all through the evening.

“Circumstances were against her from the first.  She was unhappy at home.  Her family and friends occupied no recognized station in life:  they were mean, underhand people, in every way unworthy of her.  It was her first ball—­it was the first time she had ever met with a man who had the breeding, the manners and the conversation of a gentleman.  Are these excuses for her, which I have no right to make?  If we have any human feeling for human weakness, surely not!

“The meeting of that night decided their future.  When other meetings had followed, when the confession of her love had escaped her, he took the one course of all others (took it innocently and unconsciously), which was most dangerous to them both.  His frankness and his sense of honor forbade him to deceive her:  he opened his heart and told her the truth.  She was a generous, impulsive girl; she had no home ties strong enough to plead with her; she was passionately fond of him—­and he had made that appeal to her pity which, to the eternal honor of women, is the hardest of all appeals for them to resist.  She saw, and saw truly, that she alone stood between him and his ruin.  The last chance of his rescue hung on her decision.  She decided; and saved him.

“Let me not be misunderstood; let me not be accused of trifling with the serious social question on which my narrative forces me to touch.  I will defend her memory by no false reasoning—­I will only speak the truth.  It is the truth that she snatched him from mad excesses which must have ended in his early death.  It is the truth that she restored him to that happy home existence which you remember so tenderly—­which he remembered so gratefully that, on the day when he was free, he made her his wife.  Let strict morality claim its right, and condemn her early fault.  I have read my New Testament to little purpose, indeed, if Christian mercy may not soften the hard sentence against her—­if Christian charity may not find a plea for her memory in the love and fidelity, the suffering and the sacrifice, of her whole life.

“A few words more will bring us to a later time, and to events which have happened within your own experience.