I returned to the papers and studied them, far into the night. There was the evidence of the fifty thousand dollars received; and there, too, was the evidence of the prior marriage—the first wife living at the time of the taking of the second. It was a sad tale, the story of that first wife; a tale of neglect, of desertion, of want and wo; a tale told in letters written from a far distant land, and blotted with many tears. I steeled my heart against it. How else could we of “The Profession” live? As the surgeon, compassionless, cuts with steady nerve through flesh, and bone, and marrow, and saves the life which pity would have lost; so we soon learn to close the heart to sorrow; to hear nothing, to see nothing but the interest of the client; to hope for nothing but his success—God protect us! Ever dealing with the passions and the vices of men; their unholy race after mammon; strifes by the way-side; plots and counter-plots; faith broken; trusts betrayed; snares for the unwary; the innocent duped; the unfortunate trampled upon; the hoary sinner honored—God protect us! Great wonder is it, that we do not loathe the very name of man! Poor woman! If she who assumed your name and state, and defiled the marriage bed, which with you alone was pure, was guilty, although ignorant, of a careless haste, the punishment has come, equal to the fault; and you, too, are avenged—even in time.

I often saw my client, during the period of one year, which elapsed between my retainer and the trial of the suit which she had engaged me to defend. She was young—she could not have been more than twenty—without children, and her beauty grew upon me every day. With a fine figure—not too light, but rather a little heavy, with the embonpoint of the widow—with features, which were the handsomer for being irregular, and eyes which spoke the sex with all its glory and its weakness. She interested something more than professional pride, or manly compassion in her favor. Her intellect, too, was brilliant and cultivated; and her manners most refined: certainly it would have been pardonable in a bachelor to have made her cause wholly his own. But there was a mystery woven into the history of her life, which she either could not, or was not pleased to remove. In one only, of the many papers and few family letters which she from time to time put into my hands, did I find any allusion made to her father. She never herself voluntarily spoke of him; and whenever I questioned her upon the subject, she was evidently much troubled by my inquiries, and professed to be utterly ignorant of that side of her house. She had known her mother only under her maiden name, and had lived with her, in one of our northern cities in great seclusion, until she met with Mr. Andrews, married him, and removed to New Orleans. Shortly after her marriage her mother had died, bequeathing her fifty thousand dollars, the result of economy and business habits. What folly, what shame, what crime had given her birth, or had removed as beneath a cloud her father from her sight, she knew not; but her mother had often told her that she was born in honest wedlock, and that some day she should claim her own. She knew not the place of her birth, nor her mother’s relatives, and stood as one without relationship in the world. How her heart yearned to find in other veins the blood which flowed in her own! At such times, when my questions had stirred the fountain of her tears, and the grief of desolation ran over, she would wring her hands in a passion of sorrow, and call upon heaven to give her knowledge—to give her father to her arms.

“Pardon,” she would murmur, “these exhibitions of my weakness; it is terrible not to know the father that begat you; terrible to hear want, even to destitution, knocking at your door.”

——