“I reached Mr. Strafford’s door, and we were received with all kindness; but the fright, the sudden exposure to cold night air, after being for so many hours shut up in a stifling room, and perhaps, added to all a few drops of spirit which had been forced into your mouth, brought on you a sudden, and to me most terrible, illness.  It was your first; I had never seen you suffer, and I thought you would die; that God would take you from me as the last and crowning punishment for my disobedience.  In the great anguish of this idea, I wrote to my father—­wrote by your bedside while you slept, and confessing all my folly, implored his forgiveness, as if that would preserve my child’s life.  You recovered, and in my joy I almost forgot that the letter had been written.  While you lay ill, the Straffords concealed from me that my husband had been to the house demanding my return home; but when you were almost well, they told me not only this, but that he had declared in the village that he would punish us both for our flight.  It was then that Mr. Strafford recommended me to think seriously of a final escape.

“‘It is evident,’ he said, ’that you neither can, nor ought, to put yourself and your child again into his power—­while you remain on the island it must be here; but I strongly advise you to return to England, or conceal yourself from him in some way.’

“I gratefully accepted his invitation to remain for a little while at his house—­the rest of his plan could not be hastily decided upon; and while I deliberated, a letter arrived from England.  Mr. Strafford, on hearing of the scene which ended in your illness, had carried out an idea which, he afterwards told me, he had long entertained, and written to my cousin George.  The letter which now arrived was in answer to this, though it contained an enclosure for me.  My appeal to my father had been made just in time; it reached him on his deathbed, and he forgave me.  He did more than that; he altered, at the very last, a will made many years before, and left me an equal sum to that I had before inherited from my mother, but with the condition that I should never return to England.  You understand now why, loving the dear old country as I still do, I have always told you I should never see it again—­to do so would be to forfeit all our living, and more even than that, it would be to disobey my father’s last command.  My cousin’s note was as kind and brotherly as if he had never had the least reason to complain of me.  He told me that he had married some years before a good woman who, I have since thought, might have been his first choice if regard for my father’s wishes had not influenced him.  At any rate, they were and, I hope, still are happy together, filling my father and mother’s places in the old home.