'
'My beloved mother!' said Venetia, with streaming eyes, 'you cannot
have a feeling that I do not share.'
'Venetia, you know not what I had to endure!' exclaimed Lady Annabel,
in a tone of extreme bitterness. 'There is no degree of wretchedness
that you can conceive equal to what has been the life of your mother.
And what has sustained me; what, throughout all my tumultuous
troubles, has been the star on which I have ever gazed? My child! And
am I to lose her now, after all my sufferings, all my hopes that she
at least might be spared my miserable doom? Am I to witness her also a
victim?' Lady Annabel clasped her hands in passionate grief.
'Mother! mother!' exclaimed Venetia, in agony, 'spare yourself, spare
me!'
'Venetia, you know how I have doted upon you; you know how I have
watched and tended you from your infancy. Have I had a thought, a
wish, a hope, a plan? has there been the slightest action of my life,
of which you have not been the object? All mothers feel, but none ever
felt like me; you were my solitary joy.'
Venetia leant her face upon the table at which she was sitting and
sobbed aloud.
'My love was baffled,' Lady Annabel continued. 'I fled, for both our
sakes, from the world in which my family were honoured; I sacrificed
without a sigh, in the very prime of my youth, every pursuit which
interests woman; but I had my child, I had my child!'
'And you have her still!' exclaimed the miserable Venetia.
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