“Miriam!”

“Not one drop!  If there did, you should not now be standing by my death bed.  I would expire unrepenting and unconfessed.  Mollie, you are mine—­my very own—­my daughter!”

She raised herself on her elbow and caught Mollie in her arms with a sudden, fierce strength.  The girl stood perfectly speechless with the shock.

“My child—­my child—­my child!  For years I have hungered and thirsted for this hour.  I have desired it as the blind desire sight.  My child—­my child! have you no word for your dying mother?”

“Mother!”

The word broke from Mollie’s white lips like a sobbing sigh.  The intense surprise of the unexpected revelation stunned her.

“You believe me, then—­you do believe me!” Miriam cried, holding her fast.

“You are dying,” was Mollie’s solemn answer.  “Oh, my mother! why did you not tell me this before?”

“Because I would not disgrace you and drag you down.  I loved you far too well for that.  I could have done nothing for you but bespatter you with the mire in which I wallowed, and I wanted you, my beautiful one—­my pearl, my lily—­to be spotless as mountain snow.  It can do you no harm to know when I am dead.”

“And Carl Walraven is nothing to me?”

“Nothing, Mollie—­less than nothing.  Not one drop of his black blood flows in your veins.  Are you sorry, Mollie?”

“No,” said Mollie, drawing a long breath.  “No!” she repeated, more decidedly.  “I am glad, Miriam—­mother.”

“You can call me mother, then, despite all?”

“Surely,” Mollie said, gravely; “and now tell me all.”

“Ah, it is a long, sad story—­a wicked and miserable story of shame, and sin, and suffering!  It is a cruel thing to blight your young life with the record of such horrible things.”

“I may surely bear what others have to endure.  But, Miriam, before you begin, do you really mean to tell me Mr. Walraven thinks me his daughter?”

“He believes it as surely as he believes in Heaven.  He thinks you are his child—­Mary Dane’s daughter.”

“Who was Mary Dane?”

“Your father’s sister by marriage—­done to death by Carl Walraven.”

Mollie turned very pale.

“Tell me all,” she said.  “Begin at the beginning.  Here, drink this—­it is wine.”

She had brought a pocket-flask with her.  She filled a broken tea-cup and held it to the dry, parched lips.

Miriam drained it eagerly.

“Ah!” she said, “that is new life!  Sit down here by me, Mollie, where I can see you; give me your hands.  Now listen: 

“Mollie, you are eighteen years old, though neither you nor Carl Walraven thinks so.  You are eighteen this very month.  His child, whom he thinks you are, would be almost seventeen, if alive.  She died when a babe of two years old.

“Eighteen years ago, Mollie, I was a happy wife and mother.  Down in Devonshire, in the little village of Steeple Hill, my husband and I lived, where we had both been born, where we had courted and married, where we hoped to lay our bones at last.  Alas and alas! he fills a bloody grave in the land of strangers, and I am drawing my last breath in far America.  And all, Mollie—­all owing to Carl Walraven.”