“Yes, Duke of Hereward, your son stands before you, strong, healthy, beautiful, perfect as ever wife bore to her husband; yet denied, delegalized, and defrauded by you, his father!

“If you are inclined still to deny him, turn and look upon him, as he stands, and you can no longer do so.  If you want further proof, find it in these circumstances:  That this letter is written, and these statements are made by a dying woman, with the immediate prospect of eternity and its retribution before her.

“But on one point be at ease before you read farther; the boy does not know who his father is, and therefore does not know how grievously, how irretrievably you wronged him by divorcing his mother and delegalizing him before his birth.  I would not put enmity between father and son by telling him anything about it. He thinks that his father is dead, and I have never undeceived him.  He has heard of you only as one who was a friend of his mother, and who, for her sake, may become the friend of her son.  It must be for you to decide whether to leave him in this ignorance or to tell him the truth.

“Perhaps you will ask why I have concealed your son’s existence from you up to this time.  I will tell you; but in order to do so clearly, I must refer to those last few weeks spent with you in Paris before our separation.

“Remember the ball at the British Embassy, to which you persuaded me to go, and where I met, unexpectedly the Count de Volaski, my secretly married husband, supposed to be dead; remember my illness that followed! and how earnestly I tried to avoid him, an effort that was totally useless, because he, considering that he possessed the only rightful claim to my society, constantly sought me, and you, ignorant of all his antecedents, constantly helped him to see me.

“My position was degrading, agonizing, intolerable.  I found myself, though guiltless of any intentional wrong-doing, in the horrible dilemma of a wife with two living husbands.

“Yes, by the laws of love and nature, justice and the church, I was the wife of Waldemar de Volaski; by the laws of France and England, I was the wife of the Duke of Hereward.

“The discovery shocked, confused, and, perhaps, unsettled my reason.  At first I knew not what to do.  I prayed for death.  I contemplated suicide.  At length, I thought I saw a way out of my dreadful dilemma.  It was to escape and to live apart from both forever.

“So also thought the Count de Volaski.  I consulted with him.  I dared not confess to you the secret that my parents had compelled me to conceal so long.  Volaski would have told you, but I would not consent that he should do so, until I should be safe out of the house; for I could not have borne, after such confession, to have met you again; and again, under any circumstances, I preferred that I myself should be your informant.  I determined to leave yon, and to live apart from both, as the only life of peace and honor possible for me, and to write you a letter confessing the whole truth, as an explanation of my course of conduct.  I thought that you would understand and pity me, and leave me to my fate.