“This news, so joyful to most good women, only filled my soul with sorrow and dismay.  It seemed to complicate my difficulties beyond all possibility of extrication.

“Lena, poor woman, who had never heard of my marriage with the Duke of Hereward, but had known me as the wife of the Count de Volaski, believed that all my distress was caused by the prospect of becoming the mother of a fatherless child, and bent all her energies to try to comfort me with the assurance that this motherhood would be the greatest blessing of my lonely life.

“Ah! how willing would I have confided the whole truth to this good woman if I had dared to do so!  It will show how timid I had grown when I assure you that I, a faithful daughter of the church, had not even ventured to go to confession once since my arrival in Italy.

“Now, Duke of Hereward, attend to my words!  Had you been less bitterly incredulous of my statements, less cruel in your judgment of me, less murderous in your vengeance upon one much more sinned against than sinning, I should have ventured to write to you of my condition and my prospect of giving you an heir to your dukedom, in time to prevent your rash and fatal act by which you unconsciously delegalized your own lawful son!

“But your murderous cruelty had left me in a state of stupor from which I could not rally.

“Night after night I resolved to write to you.  Day after day I tried to carry my resolution into effect.  Time after time I failed through fear of you!

“At length I persuaded myself that there was no immediate necessity for action on my part.  I might defer writing to you until the arrival of my child.  That child might prove to be a girl, who could not be your heir, and, therefore, could not be an object of momentous importance to you; or it might die.  Either of which circumstance would relieve me from the painful duty of opening a correspondence with you; or I myself might perish in the coming trial, when the duty of communicating the facts to you would devolve upon some one whom I would appoint with my dying breath.

“These were the causes of my fatal delay in writing to you.

“At length the time arrived.  On the fifth of April, just five months after our separation.  I became the mother of a fine, healthy, beautiful boy.  He brought with him the mother-love that is Heaven’s first gift to the child.  I loved my son as I never loved a human being before.  I had prayed for death; but as I clasped my first-born to my bosom, I asked pardon for that sinful prayer, thanked the Lord that I had lived through my trial, and besought him still to spare my life for my boy’s sake.  From that day forth I was able to pray and to give thanks.  I resolved that my first act of recovery should be to go to the church and make my confession to the good father there, gain my absolution, and then write and inform you of the birth of your heir, the infant Earl of Arondelle,