That winter her mother fell ill, and Mr. Lea felt it right that the small property she had had for her life should be properly secured to her sons, according to the division their father had intended.  So a lawyer was brought from Montreal and her will was made.  Thus another person knew about it, and he was much struck, and explained to Hester that she was really a lady of rank, and probably the only child of her father who had any legal claim to his estates.  Lea, with a good deal of the old American Republican temper, would not be stirred up.  He despised lords and ladies, and would none of it; but the lawyer held that it would be doing wrong not to preserve the record.  Hester had grown excited, and seconded him; and one day, when Lea was out, the lawyer brought a magistrate to take Mrs. Dayman’s affidavit as to all her past history—­marriage witnesses and all.  She was a good deal overcome and agitated, and quite implored Hester never to use the knowledge against her father; but she must have been always a passive, docile being, and they made her tell all that was wanted, and sign her deposition, as she had signed her will, as Faith Trevor, commonly known as Faith Dayman.

She did not live many days after.  It was on the 3rd of February, 1836, that she died; and in the course of the summer Hester had a son, who throve as none of her babies had done.

Then she lay and brooded over him and the rights she fancied he was deprived of, till she worked herself up to a strong and fixed purpose, and insisted upon making all known to her father.  Now that her mother was gone she persuaded herself that he had been a cruel, faithless tyrant, who had wilfully deserted his young wife.

Joel Lea would not listen to her.  Why should she wish to make his son a good-for-nothing English lord?  That was his view.  Nothing but misery, distress, and temptation could come of not letting things alone.  He held to that, and there were no means forthcoming either of coming to England to present herself.  The family were well to do, but had no ready money to lay out on a passage across the Atlantic.  Nor would Hester wait.  She had persuaded herself that a letter would be suppressed, even if she had known how to address it; but to claim her son’s rights, and make an earl of him, had become her fixed idea, and she began laying aside every farthing in her power.

In this she was encouraged, not by the lawyer who had made the will—­ and who, considering that poor Faith’s witnesses had been destroyed, and her certificate and her wedding ring taken from her by the Indians, thought that the marriage could not be substantiated—­but by a clever young clerk, who had managed to find out the state of things; a man named Perrault, who used to come to the farm, always when Lea was out, and talk her into a further state of excitement about her child’s expectations, and the injuries she was suffering.  It was her one idea.  She says she really believes she should